First Quarter 2019 review

Let's see if I pull this off. Trying to pull pics for an entire year is daunting to me. It's hard to choose. I decided these last four days to post a quarter of the year a day. It's still taking me forever just to pick out and reduce the size of the pictures. Hahaha.

It was a year ago December that we jammed to New Mexico for a few days to look at a couple of properties. We fell in love with the property of one and made an as is offer. During our journey back north to Idaho, the offer was accepted and with a closing of the first of March we had a lot to do when we got home to Nampa. Larry listed and sold in the same day our travel trailer the end of December.

X marks the spot!

January we were shopping for things we knew we were going to need at the new place in Datil, NM. It was remote and an entire day would be taken up with shopping when there. We lived in the hub of a city still, so decided to shop and store stuff in the garage. I found my new curio cabinet, our carpet shampooer and a wonderful old desk for my new office/studio in NM. Larry found a utility trailer too that would be very useful at our new place. I also found someone to recover my Grams old chair.


 






 










I was slowly packing up the house and Larry was packing up his shop. We also spent a lot of time with paint chips so we could decide on what we were going to do down at the new place in March. It took weeks to get it down to the color we loved and by then we had been all over the board with ideas, but in the end kept it simple. One color throughout and another color for doors and door frames.
 

 








We had visits with Andrea, Connor and even Ian during his winter break, coffee dates, fresh flowers and enjoying the last months in Idaho.

February was still packing, shopping and planning. We put out feelers for a real estate agent to list our Nampa home so we could get it listed after the NM house closed. We had decided we weren't going to time ourselves out of a place to live.  I knew once NM closed I was going to be hard pressed to be patient in Nampa, waiting for it to sell, so I just kept "knowing" the right buyer would come along quickly and we would be permanently in  the new place in Spring...NOT Summer. Hahaha. Oh...we found the perfect agent for us and she was totally on board with our plans.

I still made time to relax with my crocheting and art. We took walks when we could, saw a movie or two, had the kids over etc.

 

Somewhere in Idaho

The house closed in NM on the agreed date of March 4th, even though the sellers had to throw out a little drama at the end, wanting some extra time... Our response was no. We had picked an unusually long closing date because of winter weather and the holidays being in there too. The sellers chose to take some of that time to take a trip to Europe...not our problem. We had our ducks in a row, we were watching the weather for our trip down and we had to stick to our guns. Our exceptional NM real estate agent did the final walk through for us, the place became ours and we were loading the BIG Uhaul. 

Utah south of Green River

The plan was to take as much was we could the first trip, to make the final trip easier. Larry drove the big moving van and I trailed with our truck and our utility trailer that had stuff in it.  We had a big 40' long shipping container at the new place for storage and we didn't want to load too much in the house because we had a LOT of cleaning and painting to do. I had even made an appointment with a carpet stretcher man to stretch the carpet in the first days we were there. We made the trip in two days and the weather was good and we were dog tired when we arrived. It was 1,019 miles door to door.

We blew up our airbed, started a fire and enjoyed our first night in NM.  We spent the next three weeks cleaning, taking stuff down, (we had a pile to load in the bed of our truck for the trip back to put in our garbage pick up...no pick up in NM), 
I cleaned carpets, and painted doors, Larry scrubbed and painted walls and ceilings and bathroom cabinets. We were up with the sun and pooped out by dark. 
I had precooked a bunch of food and froze it so I wouldn't have to cook. That was a life saver!!! We were sore, had cracked fingers but wanted to get a good portion of the house done before we left.

 

 










We had snow and rain. A taste of the seasons to come and
 







sunshine galore. The quiet almost hurt our ears! Then we saw our first elk!!!  It was very exciting.  Then.  Then.  A herd of Pronghorn Antelope hung out by the back fence. It was amazing! 
 

I even finished this beauty!

In three weeks we did so much and we even got some stuff placed and put away!!! I had everything put away in the kitchen cabinets...after they were all washed out of course. And the big desk and curio cabinet put in place.  It was starting to come together. 

The utility room, master bedroom and bath, the living room (soon to be my office/studio), the dining room, the bedroom/den that opened to the living room, all the closets and hallway were all completed. Meaning carpets cleaned, and fresh paint, top to bottom. We were living in the family room and using the two end bedrooms to sleep in and store stuff in while doing this first phase of work. Everything took longer than planned...it's the biggest house we've ever tackled. And Larry had some exterior stuff he had to take care of too.  We would still have about half the house to do when we came back the final time, but we wouldn't be under any time constraints.
 

The trip back to Idaho was good, we were tired, but knew we could rest all we wanted when we got back. Back in Idaho on March 27th. The rain held off until we hit Nampa....  And we listed the house.

Larry was in picking up our mail and it started raining!