Finishing touches 1-24-08

The temporary home base is pretty much finished…at least on the inside. The drapes for the living room are perfect and really finish off the room, the inexpensive lamps I found worked out great, even though there was a huge dent in the base of the floor lamp, but you can’t really see it so I didn’t worry about it. There would be no guarantee that the next box wouldn’t have something worse wrong.

The curio cabinet is lovely and Larry anchored it to the wall before I filled it up…earthquakes and grandsons are equal threats! The light in the case is inadequate but my crackle glass collection looks great anyways.

The mattress swap went off without a hitch yesterday so now the guest room is finished. We got some pictures hung and a lot will get packed back up, they just won’t work in this house.

Larry is working on the garage still and putting up shelves in the laundry room and a closet. We got our library cards today and I checked out books on Xeriscaping. That will be our next project some time later this year.

Blog entries are probably going to get a little thin unless we take a field trip or something. I’ll try to check in a least once a week or so.

Snow again...yuck! 1-20-08

Today started out sunny. We debated taking a drive, but decided neither one of us had a driving need...ha-ha...to go anywhere today. I planned on doing nothing, but that didn't last long. I decided to go through the framed prints we've had in storage and figure out where to hang some of them. Most will find a home somewhere, but a few just don't go. I had to run to Wal-Mart to get picture hangers and then we got several pictures hung up. It is starting to feel like our place more every day. Getting familiar things put out around helps, but things I loved four years ago, just aren't important today.

It started snowing this afternoon and by the time it quit later this evening we had between 4 and 6 inches depending on where you look.

Tomorrow our drapes for the living room should arrive by UPS, my new curio cabinet arrives and I guess we have to call the furniture store in Reno to light a fire under them to get our mattress exchanged. I HATE when people tell you something and then don't follow through. Thats why I try not to let people pin me down to something unless I can be one hundred percent sure because it isn't nice to let people down.

Those of you who have followed my blog for a long time will remember that January of last year we were freezing our hineys off in the Houston, Texas area helping my Aunt Gretchen deal with all the red tape while my cousin Darcy, her youngest daughter was recovering from a near fatal car accident. Darcy is somewhere between a few and several years younger than me. I just thought I would give you all a little update; I talked to Darcy a couple of days ago and she had a great holiday season hanging with her family! She had missed Christmas the year before fighting for her life in the ICU. She is doing great! She recently passed her Real Estate College Courses and is cramming for the Real Estate Boards. She already has an agency waiting for her to come work for them. Darcy was a stay at home Mom, so being an independent woman is very important to her now that her kids are all grown. She is a cheerful, out going person and will do great in her chosen field. Yay Darcy!!!!

Almost done! 1-19-08

I’ll just give you the last six days highlights. It has been cold, but sunny and no wind.

Monday the queen set for the guest room was delivered. They called to say they would be late, which was nice, but they were in an all fired hurry to get things dropped so they could get on down the road. I didn’t notice the condition of the mattress until they were gone of course…two edges were totally busted. Just gently pushing with my hand I could compress the side of the mattress by half…not right. So I was on the phone with the furniture store. We were going to Reno the next day so we agreed to stop and pick out a new mattress for them to exchange.

I also had to call the service department where we bought our sofa. I noticed that the front of one sofa arm looked like it had gone on a diet…the two wrinkles caught my eye and it isn’t as plump as all the other arms so a week from Friday a “technician” will be out to take care of the problem.

In case you haven’t noticed the pattern yet, it seems that there is no such thing as quality control any longer. We have never had any reason to buy so many new things, and I would say we have had problems with 95% of the things we have purchased. I really think that most people are so busy in their daily lives that they just settle with what ever they get. I discovered that about myself these past couple of weeks. I don’t like confrontation and just want things to go smoothly, but I realize I do a great disservice to myself by settling. I worry that people think I’m too picky or am being a pain in the ass by wanting things done correctly and I have decided that “they” don’t know me and if we don’t start caring about things being done right our standards just keep sliding down the tubes. I just have to stick to my guns until stuff gets done right, after all it’s my money paying for it! I’ll imagine being like two women I really admire for their ability to get things done, Larry’s Aunt Bonnie and my Cousin Pat. If they can do it, so can I…I just sometimes forget that I am a grown up.

Tuesday we went to Reno and got our mattress issue resolved, though as of today the exchange still hasn’t been made. We also exchanged the two night stands and Larry put them together in the parking lot on the bed of our truck to make sure all the parts were there.

Wednesday I hauled in all the books from the trailer that I have been carting around the country. After the third or fourth pile I scared Larry (our sense of humor has been a little slow lately) when I said that the trailer was tipping up…I was pulling his leg because I must have pulled a couple hundred pounds or more of books out of various cupboards.

The truck is grounded at Chevy waiting for its new fuel injectors. If we had kept driving it we would have done serious damage to the engine, I guess they found fuel in the oil. It has a mere 83,000 miles or so on it, but I guess some are having this problem as we got a notice about it. We didn’t get the rental car until the next day.

Thursday Larry put shelves in one of the closets for some of my books. We got our rental, a compact Pontiac G5. They are working on getting us a truck. We hauled in all the perishables and necessities. It was simply amazing what we packed in that trailer and what efficient storage it has. BUT, we also discovered a lot of stuff that just needed to be thrown away and gotten rid of. We humans just love hanging onto “stuff” and on so many levels…but that is another tangent.

I felt very sad to be unloading my home of the last 4 years and I just kept reminding myself it is just a reorganizing and we’ll be back on the road soon! Larry figures we’ll be so much lighter we can get a smaller truck…just kidding, our humor is returning!

We have been on redecorating burnout, but we are nearing the end finally. Neither one of us want to quit traveling, a house is a HUGE anchor; we could have just left the house empty and for sale, but it would have just deteriorated and that just isn’t our style. Musty, dingy, animal smells aren’t big selling points. We don’t intend to quit traveling but there is always something that needs to be done with a house. Our trailer needed things too, but we could take care of it where ever we were! This is just another change that we are adapting too. Everything happens for a reason and we belong here for now.

So Thursday after we unloaded everything we needed to get out of it, Larry pulled the plug on the trailer and it is on ice for the next few months! Literally right now with it being so cold!

Yesterday, Larry traded the cigarette smelly compact rental for a bigger Yukon. They are still trying to get us a truck, but at least we could fit something bigger than a shoebox in the back of the thing! We also continued putting things away in their new home, cleaning and Larry put in an outlet and switch for a light in our little pantry. He also installed our lovely new chandelier in the kitchen. The one that was here was shiny brass and it was all you could see when you looked in the kitchen and the glass looked like overturned cheap candy dishes…it was ugly.

I mopped all the floors for the first time now that all the dusty, dirty work has been done. They came out very shiny, which was surprising because there had been a cleaning agency that had cleaned the house from top to bottom before we took possession and the floors were dull, I just assumed that the finish was gone on them. Now I’m guessing that they were either never cleaned or whatever the agency used left a nasty film on the floors. But then I forget all the things that still weren’t cleaned even after the agency came back a second time. We weren’t impressed with their work.

Today we bought a TV, DVD, VCR combo set. We wanted simple and not a lot of wire or different boxes hanging about. It is the biggest TV we have ever owned at 27 inches and is huge compared to the 13 inch one we have been watching. We might have done permanent damage straining our eyes trying to see that thing from across the room! We also found a nice low profile stand for it, unfortunately size doesn’t help the fact that we still can’t seem to find anything to watch on the silly thing!

I told Larry that the truck had better get fixed soon or it’ll be replaced by this Yukon we have been able to drive. It is comfortable and handles nicely. Our truck needs a football field to turn in with its long wheelbase and being able to turn on a dime in and out of parking is a joy.

Here are the pictures of the lovely job my electrician Larry did of our bathroom light fixtures.

We hope to take a day off and go on a field trip sometime this next week. We need to get out of this cloud of interior pollution for a few hours and not a field trip to a Home Depot, Lowe’s or Wal-Mart! Just sky and fresh air, Nevada has a lot of both!

Look at the stunning sky I see most evenings as the sun sets! I love that our house faces west! I don’t think I’ll ever buy another house unless it has a great view to the west!

Furniture, Now We are Civilized! 1-13-08

Friday the carpet was finished and Larry got all the doors re-hung. It took over an hour and lots of emptying of the filter from the vacuum cleaner to get the carpet all tidied up, lots of loose fibers and fuzz. It is very nice now that it is all finished. Here is our bedroom with its lovely non-accent wall.

Saturday Larry did all the prep work on the walls in the bathrooms and I touched up the walls from having the carpet installed. The touch up needed wasn’t as bad as we thought it would be with all the scraping we heard!

We went into Reno to order the bed set for the guest room. It arrives on Thursday. Reno is growing and changing so fast…we drove around for over a half hour looking for the Target store and we couldn’t find it…asked someone finally and it isn’t there any longer. A least we hadn’t lost our minds.

Then it was back to Home Depot for more miscellaneous stuff for the closets and bathrooms. We went into Sparks where there is a big new shopping area looking for nightstands. We check out an import store, found something that would work, but we felt it was overpriced. We went next door into Bed, Bath and Beyond and right in the foyer were nightstands and just what I was looking for. We bought two walnut stained and two white ones. We got a call from the furniture store wanting to move our delivery date of the bed up to Monday…works for us!

After we got home that evening Larry worked at assembling them. The first one had a split in the backboard, but it wasn’t critical. The second one had the wrong rail mounted on the sidewall so we can’t use one of the drawers until they send us the part to fix it. The varnish stinks so bad they are sitting in the garage de-stinking, we hope. Larry then began on the white nightstand and the back had blue writing all down it, some packer had written on the foam wrapping it and it bled through, it went down hill from there…scratched pieces and then a broken piece….well, it all went back in the box with a lot of verbalizing on the part of the assembler. Both of the white ones are going back to the store, which is in Sparks, so 130 mile drive and hoping that they new ones are o.k. Larry will probably assemble them there before we head home.

Today we worked on the bathrooms. I taped and draped and Larry painted. I cleaned the recliner area of our trailer and we put our recliners back out there where they belonged. Larry got the new lights up in the bathroom…what a wonderful difference. I haven’t taken pics of them yet.

Our furniture arrived and I futzed around with them, pushing them here and there until I got them where I think they’ll stay for now. The tables joined the nightstands out in the garage, they are stinky too. So are the couches…everything new stinks and this is the wrong time of year for redecorating, it is too cold to leave the windows open to help get rid of the smells. It is really nice to have furniture again after two weeks of empty rooms. The second picture is how I left them…today.

We hope to be done in another week with all this settling in. We still have lots of stuff to bring in out of the trailer. Tomorrow the guest room bed gets delivered so that room will be finished, well almost, we need to get the nightstands replaced. I take weeks to get stuff hung on the walls.

Our truck has to go to the truck doctor and get its fuel injectors replaced. It is stinking and smoking, we got a notice about them awhile ago and Larry hopes they can get everything ordered before we have to leave it at the shop. Having only the one vehicle makes it tough when it needs maintenance.

Today we didn’t see any sunshine, just lots of freezing fog. It started to lift for a bit this afternoon, but then it settled back in. This last picture I took of ice crystals that had formed on the handle of the trailer. These crystals were on the trees and everything.

Lots of things we haven't missed on the road! 1-11-08

Wow, six days since I last blogged. I thought about it a couple of times, but didn’t really find the time. I’ll catch you up…

I guess because we haven’t had a house in four years we are getting all the trials in one fell swoop to remind us of why we like living in a trailer on the road.

I don’t know how decorators do it, they must have really thick skins or know their stuff so well they never question their decisions. Having learned our lesson with the little paint chips, for our last bedroom we chose the palest of greens we could find. I decided to paint a test patch on the wall just to make sure…it was so light Larry couldn’t find the green on the white walls until I pointed it out to him.

Here is a tip before you paint: you really need to pay attention to your light sources and watch how the color on you walls changes over the course of a sunny day, how it looks at night with artificial light and on cloudy days. If you have a lot of windows your paint color will probably stay pretty true, but it you get a lot of shadowing, the color’s seem darker. Ours actually change color in the corner from wall to wall depending on the light.

So anyway, Larry painted the “green room” and of course it darkened up a little and was the perfect shade, tone, of green that we wanted. I wimped out on the bathrooms, going Off White, which will look like sandy beige when it is done. I am too scared of color on walls; I am just going to be colorful with the things I put in the rooms and leave the “accent colors” to the professionals!

This was Sunday by the way and Larry even got our new light fixture hung in the living room. He had to rewire the thing of course and cuss out the builders of the house because they put all the electrical boxes in the house with sheet rock screws instead of the screws that come with the boxes. Means nothing to me, but mattered a great deal to Larry.

On Monday Larry finished painting the green room and ripped up all the carpet and pad in the rest of the house. Yuck, I swept up a bunch of junk and dirt and I don’t even want to know stuff. Larry then painted Kilz primer on all the pet pee spots on the wood floor. That stuff works, but does it ever have killer fumes! We left for the new Lowe’s in Fernley. It is only a half hour away instead of the hour drive to Reno for Home Depot.

I think we were at least 2 hours in Lowes. The funny lady at the check stand watching us debate the merits of all the bathroom light fixtures asked if we had brought dinner with us! I told her that at least Costco provided snacks…something Lowes might want to consider….smile. After spending probably an hour in that one department alone we decided on only one bathroom light…we needed two.

We also bought faux wood blinds for the master bedroom and living room and a towel bar and misc. other stuff. After we got back home and after dinner, Larry hung the blinds in the master bedroom. Now, here is a quirk of mine: I do not like my windows obstructed by anything like the slats of mini blinds during the day. So I tip them to keep the sun out and then after the sun passes I pull them up to the top. Here’s a tip, if the blind box is REALLY heavy, you are not pulling your blinds up and down every day and these were not mini-blinds which is what I had in the past. So after Larry wrestled with them and we decided we hated them, down they came and back into the box. At least we decided this before he hung the blinds in the other window.

The house really echoes and is colder without carpet and pad and that fine dust blows around every time the heater goes on AND getting up in the middle of the night to trek to the bathroom was fraught with danger with the tack strips from the carpet waiting to attack if you take a miss step. I guess you get that I do not like this whole redecorating the whole house at one time thing!

Tuesday, the 8th, dump day. Loaded up all the old carpet pad and miscellaneous boxes and old stuff that has been collecting in the garage for the past week and topped it all with the old carpet. It didn’t rain on Larry and he dumped 580 pounds at the dump. It cost a little over nine dollars, better than Larry expected.

After lunch, which he decided was a mistake; he crawled under the house with the piece of board he bought yesterday to fix the broken floor board in the master bedroom. He said in a couple spots it was touch and go whether he was going to get stuck and he was so tired at one point after nailing the board that he was resting and almost fell asleep. Not the greatest place to take a nap! I told him if he had gotten stuck he would have just had to stay there until he got a little skinnier because there was no way in you know where that I was going under there to help him!

After he got out of there he took down the old bathroom lights…I heard cussing, apparently another builder boo-boo. Sure enough they didn’t mount the box for the light center over the counters and to make the lights center the installer just pounded the sheetrock out with his hammer over to the point he mounted the light. Fixable, but a LOT more work. Thank goodness for us Larry knows how to do all this stuff! The annoying part is it should be simple and for the people that hire this stuff out end up paying big for all the extra time that it would take an electrician to fix the problem that shouldn’t have been there in the first place!

So after some debate Larry decides the light we chose for the guest bathroom will still work and he had to do some thinking over the master bathroom, because of course there is a pipe running up the wall almost dead center of the sink in the master bathroom; doesn’t really matter though, because the sink isn’t centered in the counter or vanity any way! Wow. And so it goes. Oh, because of the lighting issues, we couldn’t paint the bathrooms yet which we were hoping to get done before the carpet came.

Then it is back to Lowes to return the 2 inch blinds, find mini blinds and then get a bathroom light for the master bathroom.

Now it is Wednesday. We are really excited about today. We get the bed stood up in the kitchen and our two recliners from the trailer that we have been using into the kitchen. The carpet arrives!! Our installer is great. Has the attention to detail that we like and is considerate of our walls and fixtures. Some scraping can’t be helped; it is the nature of the beast. Carpet backing is stiff and like sandpaper, but Dallas is very careful and is doing a great job. He has all the carpet laid out in all the rooms and is starting the gluing of the seams, when Larry walks through the front door and says that the two pieces of carpet are different colors. WHAT! Sure enough, where the seam runs down the room one piece is distinctly darker….lordy. No it wasn’t the nap, it was pieced correctly. Like happens with fabric or yarn the dye got messed up coming out of the machine somehow and even being off the same roll of carpet it was different. Dallas was great, he just wanted us to be happy with the job, so he gets on the phone and it was decided that they would cut another piece of carpet to join up with the living room. Yup, wrong too! So now what?! Dallas leaves and goes to the warehouse and for over an hour they pull carpet off this roll trying to get a match…nope. They think they have it but by now it is late so we’ll start again tomorrow. They want us to come by the warehouse first thing in the morning to check out what they came up with.

No carpet finished at the end of Wednesday, darn. We have a living room of lovely blue carpet pad. The fumes of the pad, carpet and paint are starting to get to us, because the pad is looking pretty to us!

Wednesday night we just flopped the mattress down on the living room floor, Motel 3! Now we have moved that bed and slept in every room of the house, thank goodness it doesn’t fit in the bathroom!

We were so disappointed and frustrated. Carpet day…the crown jewel, the finishing touch of all the hard work and nothing. We hated to put our installer through all that work, but we were paying lots of money and we wanted it right. The carpet place was doing all they could to make us happy. We spent the day caged in the kitchen, couldn’t do much of anything without getting in the way and we weren’t looking forward to another day of that, but it had to be done.

Now it is Thursday and we head over to the warehouse at 8 a.m. As SOON as we walk through the door we can see that the two pieces are two different colors….crap. Then in talking to the guy that makes the decisions, we find out there is another whole roll of this carpet. He had offered us an upgrade, but I didn’t like the upgraded carpet. Larry was thinking that if they had decided that the whole roll was flawed, why didn’t they just break out the new roll? So then it was wait another hour or so while they pulled carpet from the new roll and back we go. Now it looks o.k. Larry expressed his concerns that now the bedrooms being off a different roll weren’t going to match up, but they all thought that it would match up o.k.

So Dallas comes back and gets started on the living room again. They have him do a serpentine seam to help blend better, he doesn’t like them and for a bunch of technical reasons I won’t go into Larry doesn’t like them either, but it’s done and at least the two pieces are the same color. So now we are off and running. It’s getting to afternoon and Dallas starts seaming the bedrooms to the hallway and sure enough…noticeably different colors. So Dallas is back on the phone to the store. The guy at the store wants to Larry to call him or come down and talk to him. Ticked Larry off royally the way this guy was “handling” us and the problem. The guy of course agreed that the bedrooms needed to be replaced too…anything to make us happy. But the thing that angered Larry was why didn’t he just say, replace the whole works from the new roll instead of putting the decision off on us and making us feel like picky pains in the asses! They all agreed that the first WHOLE roll of carpeting was flawed, so they should have just bitten the bullet and said the whole job needs to start over. We just wanted it done, but done right.

We decided to just leave the master bedroom, it was done and we were just worn down by the whole thing. This morning of course Larry wishes we had them replace that one too, but I think once it’s all broke in you won’t notice the line in the doorway so much (I’m hoping). We got our bedroom put together last night.

This morning, day three of a simple one day carpet job, Dallas showed up with the new bedroom carpet and it is fine. It is after noon and he is in the finishing up stages, so the rest of today we will be doing the finishing touches; hanging curtains, working on the bathrooms, cleaning etc.

We had more snow the night before last, about an inch. Today it is sunny and cold.

Even people buying new construction, might consider having an independent home inspection before they sign off on the house. We have found multitudinous other things wrong too. You hear that things on new builds have to be signed off by an inspector, but in some places I guess they don’t pay too much attention to how ALL things are done. A biggy that’ll bite us in the butt when we go to sell is when they do a pest inspection, they do not like any pieces of wood under a house and Larry found that the builder left all kinds of scraps under there that we’ll have to get taken care of at some point. Yikes.

Your all caught up now and need wonder no longer what we have been up too! Smile.

Redecorating---Still 1-5-08

Now that the fun of shopping was over…back to work. Larry finished painting the master bedroom after we decided that our “accent wall” looked hideous. The other three walls of warm gold reflected on the café au lait and turned it a murky greenish tone…not what I was envisioning! So after a lot of debate…and I mean a lot; we thought about mixing the colors we had left together to see what we got, we thought about mixing the gold with white and we just decided we aren’t accent wall kind of people. It is now the color of the other 3 walls and it looks great.

Larry also painted the guest bedroom while I painted doors. I was going for a grayish blue and it looks mostly blue, but will still be great with the curtains and bedspread. I just don’t have luck matching up the color in my head with those silly paint chips. Larry and I never really thought we would have a blue room in this house…I have a strong aversion to it in decorating after all those years of the country blue and white geese look that was so popular a decade or two ago (and I didn’t embrace it then either). We don’t follow trends that have to constantly change to stay looking current. We opt for classic standards. Poor Larry, he is such a good sport because he is the one that does most of the work, he asked me if I wanted to change the color…after the whole room was painted…nope, I’m sure it’ll be great with the bed and furnishings in it. Carpet will help the whole look too!

Yesterday and today Larry started pulling up the carpet and pad. It saves us money if we do it ourselves and probably saves on our paint job too…smile. Going to the dump sounds like it could take up a better part of a morning, it is 18 miles away! Fortunately we thought ahead and didn’t just throw it out in the yard or we would be paying to dump water too. They charge us by weight and rain soaked carpet would be way, way heavy!

I swept the floors after Larry pulled out all the staples that holds the pad in place and what a pile of dirt that resides under our carpets!!! This is a picture of the pile I swept up in the master bedroom; after only about two and a half years…yuck.

It’s no wonder we feel like we are falling in holes walking across the room or the furniture gets a little high on one side…they do not clean the floors or fix holes before laying carpet. There are globs of joint compound all over the place and chunks out of the wafer board they used for the floor, not to mention the broken board we found in the bedroom, now I know why I felt like I was stepping into a little hole. They just throw these houses together so fast and have no thought for the people that will be living in them and having to deal with the covered up, left over messes and mistakes! And sadly “custom” doesn’t get you any more care.

The storm we had yesterday and last night was very windy, wet, snowy and cold, but we didn’t get hit as bad as Reno and California. Fernley had huge problems we heard with a flooding ditch and 200 homes were flooded (though I haven’t seen any local news so I didn’t confirm that), flash floods were a problem everywhere, but from all we’ve read and heard about Fallon, most bad weather tends to go around…we’ll see if it’s true! It is snowing again as I write. This pic I took last night as the snow was hitting and sticking to the window.

I took pictures of our water in the backyard, so hopefully we’ll remember to get it all draining correctly when we landscape this spring/summer. Most people think that high desert dirt is sandy and that it drains…not true, the water just puddles up, runs off and the dirt becomes this slippery, snotty sloposis. Larry tried to adjust the satellite dish after a rain a few days ago and his foot prints were testaments to his attempt to keep his balance as he trekked across the yard. They were large and rimmed with two inch walls of squishy mud. Nope, no pictures of that…didn’t think of it; though you can bet if he had come in covered in mud I would have grabbed up the camera!

Power Shopping 1-2-08

Today we needed a break from all day painting and breathing paint fumes. Thank goodness we have a four door truck! It was packed and with stuff that wasn't even on my list. Let’s go to the beginning.

We were going to Reno to Home Depot to get stuff we needed for the house. We went to Wal-Mart for an electric blanket (our Wal-Mart was out) and this Wal-Mart was out too, but then we remembered we wanted to look for the $40 vacuum we had seen at our Wal-Mart (which was out) and this one had it! Yay, I hate bagless and this one has a bag.

Then, now don't faint, LARRY suggested we go check out the christmas decorations and see if we might find something for this next christmas. Everything was 75% off; we got a very pretty 7 foot fake tree strung with lights for $20. Boxes of glass ornaments 14 to a box...FIFTY CENTS. I think we ended up with a couple dozen boxes and a few other interesting things. I have enough ornaments and in two different color schemes to make the tree very pretty. Plus I got some garland, gift boxes, wrapping paper. We had two baskets with all that and it came to 105 bucks, with the vacuum. I couldn't believe it! I have never shopped the after christmas sales...I never really needed that much, plus living in Chester it was too much of a pain to get anywhere.

So now the back seat is full of stuff and we haven't even been to Home Depot yet.

Fortunately we had lunch at Applebee's and recharged! On the way to Home Depot was another Wal-Mart! Here we did find our electric blanket, and then I finally found towels I wanted in the colors I wanted and of course the rugs for the bathroom that matched and then we picked out curtains for the guest bedroom and then curtain rod and a cabinet for the bathroom that would work nicely and something else I can't remember. So we had to pack all that into the back seat.

Now we have finally arrived at Home Depot, its dark, and the first thing I spot are Giant Peace Lilies and they are only $5.98 each! I ask Larry if we rearrange and put the big stuff in the bed of the truck can we make room for the plants...yes he said. Lucky Day! I've been looking for some to help clear out the toxins in the house from all the paint and the new carpet and furniture when it gets here; I bought two. Then we found the shelves we needed for our laundry room and a closet; and a new chandelier for the dining area and a co-coordinating one for the living room and a garden hose. We have two baskets again, me with my plants and Larry with all the stuff we came for. We are pooped and we still have to rearrange the truck AGAIN to make room for the plants and it is hovering around 26 degrees while we are futzing all the stuff around! Then Larry says we forgot the curtain rod for our bedroom...CRAP...so I run back inside, get lost trying to find them, then take 10 minutes trying to make up my mind which one and then find the rings and get myself out of there! Stop at Starbucks for some liquid warmth and on the road home!

I have just never lucked out with such bargains before! Having Larry doing the math made it easier and he kept saying “is that all”…music to a shopping woman’s ears! We got home and brought the plants and the electric blanket in and put the stuff from the bed of the truck in the garage. The rest will get put away tomorrow! Lordy, this having a house is a lot of work…tee hee.