Surprises!

We moved into our new home on father's day.  We absolutely LOVE the location.. but, The move has been much more difficult than we had expected.

I realized this if the first home (of 4 homes) since I was married that hasn't been brand new or completely remodeled and updated.  I realized how spoiled I had been to have all the windows and appliances working.  Andy and I realized that our quote "we like this house because there is work we could do, but don't need to; we can move into it just how it is" was not quite accurate.

The previous owners must have had more candles burning than I had realized the two times we walked through it, because when we got here with the moving van, the house smelled like one thing- animals.  Since I am allergic to animals, that is not my favorite smell.  We camped out with Andy's parents (3 doors down!) and waited two days to set up our furniture so the carpet cleaners could come. When the carpet cleaner came, he said... um, there is animal pee on the carpet, the steamer will just make the smell worse until it dries.  Well, we gave it a try, then dried the carpets and set up our bed.  That night the smell was so strong, we could taste it.  Not quite what a woman in her first trimester of pregnancy with an overactive sense of smell wants.

sorting cherries with mommy

The next two days I deodorized, vacuumed, cleaned, sanitized, deodorized, vacuumed, febreezed, etc, the house still smelled like dog.  So we went to cherry harvest in eastern WA for the weekend.

at the loading dock in the cherry orchard

 When we got back, the house stunk.  It did smell much better when I had candles lit!   Wednesday I gave in and surrendered the battle of the carpets and had Andy rip it out, I didn't care that we have nothing to put down in its place, get the carpet out! And he did in about 15 minutes! He is so amazing.

ahhh, no more carpet!

master bedroom

We took the carpet out of our bedroom too and are camped out in the nursery. Elias loves his new room, but has a hard time staying in his new bunk bed and still prefers to sleep in his stroller.

tree in our front yard with a bouncy hammock in it

The other night Andy went downstairs to discover that the toilet was leaking and the walls of the stairs were being damaged...
it looks like this didn't start till we moved in though.

bunk beds...  before we took off the steps to
get on the top bunk

The yard of the house is still amazing as ever.  We have two kiwi vines, a male and female... hopefully they will produce many baby kiwis this year!  We have 7 blueberry bushes and 2 big red currant bushes (if anyone wants currants, now is the time to let me know!) 

kiwi vines on the garden shed

One last surprise is in our bedroom (the nursery) Andy and I get to stargaze as we go to sleep because there are plastic glow-in-the-dark stars stuck to the ceiling.  Its pretty fun, maybe I'll get them for our room when we finish the master!