Wednesday, September 21, 2011

Off the radar

We are down south with family this week and our internet connection is not so good. As soon as I can I will summarize our adventures for you. Just imagine lots of love, lots of sun and LOTS of doggies and you will have a pretty good idea of what we are up to. Talk to you soon . . . from the new house most likely. Woo!

Sunday, September 11, 2011

Big bow, beautiful baby



Welcome to our pod.

This is it! Our stuff is leaving our little yellow house for the last time. Thankfully it has a nice pod to wait in until we introduce it to the new place. Are you guys familiar with pods? We haven't had the whole experience yet, but so far I am really impressed. Especially with the crazy crustacean pod truck-loader-mover-unloader thingy. If you ever have a chance, I highly recommend watching one in action. Way cool. And then you get to have a neat little house in your driveway, which is pretty fun too. And then they will move it for you so it can be a storage space at your new house, of course, which is the whole point. But it's all sort of space age or cartoonish or something, in a good way. : )



The pod looks a little fuller than this now, and our house is much emptier than when you last saw it. It's actually bringing back some memories of when we walked in as homeowners for the first time. We've had such a nice time in this little house and I will be very happy to pass it on to another family who will hopefully love it as much as we have. Just a couple more days here now, which promise to be frantic with packing and trying to keep Ella from eating or crashing into packing supplies. On Wednesday we will be out!

(Unrelated postscript/true confession: For some reason I just feel like I should say, "Welcome to our pod" whenever I see it. And this reminds me of when I was a little girl and my best friend Allie had a sign by her pool that said, "Welcome to our ool. You'll notice there's no 'p' in it. We'd like to keep it that way." I though that was just about the cleverest thing I'd ever heard, and I'm not going to lie, I kind of still think so.)

Friday, September 09, 2011

I took granite for granted

So, it is majorly go time now at the new house. Most of the background stuff like plumbing and framing has been done, and now it is time to build cabinets, finish floors, install fixtures etc. Fun! Except I am not allowed in there because I am a breastfeeding woman who pretty much always has two little babies in tow and there is lead dust everywhere. This leaves a lot for Paul to do. Thankfully a lot of the work is being done by contractors. But the clock is ticking for the time when the dust will be clean and we'll be arranging the furniture. We are out of our current house next week and I will be moving the girls into the new house just 2 weeks after that! (In the meantime I will be with them in Florida while Paul gets things finished up and does a little thing he has to do called work.) All that to say we are picking things out at a fast and furious rate these days. The vanity has finally been settled on and ordered. And the kitchen cabinets are in the house! (Unfortunately, they are flat and waiting to be assembled. When you buy from Ikea what you really get is a cabinet-making kit, more than a set of cabinets : / but you do get a good deal if you don't count your own hourly rate.) And to bring you around to the topic of what these pictures are of, the other day we went to Marble Unlimited to pick out granite for a section of our countertops.

Have you ever been to a place like this? I had no idea that granite was so, well, big. It was amazing to see these slabs in the lot. I know quarries are really big and that's where they get the stuff, but somehow I imagined it coming in little countertop-sized pieces. This is much cooler. Aren't they pretty? And boulder-sized? (babies included for scale)




Thursday, September 08, 2011

Ow! and Car . . .

This morning Ella walked up to me with this puzzle all done! She had done it herself. It's so amazing to see her learn to do things like that. She is really cute when she plays with this one. She puts the animals over different spots and says "no" if they don't fit and "yeah" if they do. I tried to catch this on video and it didn't work out. But I did get two funny clips of a toddler being distracted, first by "Owwww" and then by a "cahhhh" (car).






Doh!

Wednesday, September 07, 2011

The Vineyards at Southpoint

One great thing about where we live is that people make wine here. We can go, just for an afternoon, to taste wine from its source and relax while we sip and look out over the vines. It's honestly like a little mini-vacation. I feel like we've been out of town when we get home.


Imagine Paul doing his best french hauh hauh hauh here. :  )



This place is actually about 15 minutes from our house. It's near the mall. Crazy. 

I loved the wine I had Sunday, a Viognet, (say it with me now, vee-oh-nyay). I attest that it is the best wine I have ever had, although I am not known for my sophisticated palate or my memory of how other wine tastes. But it was good.

Look at this though. These trees have swallowed up the support beam for this swing and made it stinkin awesome.


And we found a pretty leaf.


And Ella had a great time running around on the porch and finding acorns. 


Also at one point she got into the driveway and decided the best thing to do there would be to run full speed for the main road. How do kids know to do stuff like that? The absolute most dangerous thing is the first thing that occurs to a little person's brain sometimes. Good grief.

All in all this place get's a big thumbs up from the McCall's guide to the greater Durham area. Come visit us! We'll take you! (But I'm not sharing my glass of Viognet.)

Monday, September 05, 2011

Floors are down!





















 This is definitely progress! It was funny, when I took these photos, I was still standing at the edges of the rooms, peeking in, out of habit. I forgot for a second that I could actually walk in since the doorways no longer lead up to a cliff down into a dirty crawlspace. : )

Not quite move-in ready yet. But taking some extra time before the move-in will allow for a visit down south with Gramma and Granddaddy for a couple of weeks which is always great! Also, we have Aunt Megan booked for some help setting up house at the beginning of October. Super! There are fun times ahead.

Friday, September 02, 2011

Packing


The time has come! We are actually starting to box things up to move into the new house. On the one hand, it seems like it should be a sad thing to leave this happy house, but somehow, no. It is like (what Ella recently reminded me of) when you get new shoes after having grown out of the old ones, all of the sudden the old ones look smaller and shabbier than you'd noticed. Not that our house is shabby. We have loved it. But the thought of all the fun (and the space!) in the new one makes me really excited to get there. Also it's like a new school year. Or . . . a new . . . well you get it. Exciting!

It will still be a couple of weeks before we are are actually in, but Paul was just there and says it's looking great-evidenced by the fact that the floors are down and a lot of the construction debris is out of the halls and stuff. I will try to get there this weekend to take some more progress photos.