Settling In

 We have moved from our house of 21+ years to the condo. Whew! It was a monumental undertaking. Bruce had been clearing out his workshop all winter, while I worked on the rest of the house. We made weekly trips to the thrift store, gave lots of stuff to family and friends, had two loads of junk hauled away - and that was all before the move. Since we have moved, there has been another trip to the thrift store with donations and another load hauled off by the junk dealers.  I’ll go into more detail later in the post so those who are here only for the quilting stuff can be spared! 😁

I’m woefully behind on my sewing goals, but I plan to take the rest of April and May to catch up. To that end, my first thing to share is the twelve string blocks I made in purple, which was the March color of the month for the Rainbow Scrap Challenge (RSC). 

I still have a couple other things in purple that I need to tackle - crumb blocks and possibly a column of purple coins. Oh, and a red crumb block too. Sheesh! Nevertheless, I began sorting and sewing yellow, the RSC color for April. 

First up - Color Stix blocks. The pineapple one was my prototype block made last fall. I’ve added another yellow and a gold to bring my count up to three of these blocks for April.

My plan is to hit the scraps hard this week to get caught up on all my RSC blocks. I’ve also got two quilts ready to baste and quilt, and eight (8!!!) donation quilt tops to turn into quilts. Yeah, that will keep me busy through May!!

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The Move

Well, we got through it. It was rather The Move From Hell, mostly because of the buyers’ real estate agent who, once the deed (or title or whatever it was) was recorded, was on our cases to hurry and get OUT. Our movers arrived before 8 am (there were 4 of them) and we were not done at noon, the goal time. She was trying to talk the buyers into charging us rent by the hour for the additional 2 hours it took to get everything out. To their credit, the buyers were having none of it. After all, we left them the refrigerator, the living room TV and remote (it was mounted on the wall), most of Bruce’s machine shop machines and work benches, a roto-tiller for the garden grow boxes, garden tools and a daybed and mattresses (their request). I was helping the movers and both Bruce and I were driving carloads-ful over to the new condo to help. The agent was really a downer for us and the movers. Plus, our friends and neighbors were stopping by saying goodbye or offering to help, etc. 

To add insult to injury, when the buyers and their parents went out to lunch, their real estate agent started going through Bruce’s workshop and saying “they don’t want this” and “they don’t want that” - stuff that we thought we’d agreed on previously. So a desk, a filing cabinet and two bookshelves had to be added to the stuff we were trying to cram into the already-full moving van.

And on the condo end, it was an unloading frenzy. We bought the movers lunch (pizza) and they threw in an extra hour of work for free because we “were the nicest people they’d ever worked with”. Ha! By 6:30 pm, they were able to leave. The cats were rather freaked out and skittish for the first day and night, but they’ve mostly adjusted and have seemed to enjoy exploring their new digs. And every night, as usual, Alfalfa is in Bruce’s lap and Darla is in mine.

We’re about 95% unpacked now and we found we didn’t get rid of enough stuff! Having to bring along those 4 workshop pieces, plus getting rid of a couple junky cabinets that were left here, means we had to call the junkers again this week. 

We had a flooring contractor over on Wednesday to check out the floors here in the dining/ family area, which feel uneven. It turns out the subfloor is fine but the unevenness is caused by a formerly nice, thick carpet pad having been worn down in high traffic areas. That was a relief! 

Today we’ll meet with our family contractor to rough out a kitchen/dining room process and timeline. There is NO lighting in the vicinity of the dining table area or over the kitchen sink. In addition to the kitchen remodel, we’ll put down hardwood floors in the dining/family room and down the L-shaped hall.  I’ve got to draft a design plan and start shopping for materials - cabinets, lights, a new dishwasher, etc. So much to do!

Here is just a sneak peek of my sewing cubby room. Small, but it works!

And the other priority for the day is getting our internet hooked up. We’ve been using our telephone hotspots, which are not dependable at high traffic times - hence this post not being published until late this morning. 

Talk to you next week, friends!