New House Preview

As I indicated before, agreeing on a house across state lines was a-freaking-nnoying.  Picking out a place is also hard, isn’t it? Going in I said I had only one thing on my must have list– hardwood floors.  We have them now and I pretty much want to make out with them on a daily basis.  Two primary reasons:

A) Hardwoods are attractive.  If floors were people, hardwoods would be, like, Michael Phelps, and wall-to-wall carpet would be… I don’t know… Martin Short.

B) Germaphobe friendly! I get a sick delight out of cleaning the wood floors because you can see the grossness getting vacuumed up and scrubbed away.  Makes my heart pitter patter.  Carpet? Who knows what is or isn’t getting cleaned by the vacuum.  Can you ever truly trust a vacuum? I’ll let you ponder that.

In the end, the house that was right for us was chock-full of carpet.  Beige carpet.  From the window to the wall.  Till the… nevermind.  I made about 3 minutes worth of whiney faces/noises when this reality sunk in.

Then I did a very effective thing and I pictured what would happen if I tried to tell a group of poverty-level Bangladeshis about how hard life would be trying to live with carpets instead of hardwoods in my pretty little suburban house.  They would probably have either LOLed in my face or clubbed me senseless, depending on their mood that day.  I haven’t whined about the carpets since.  I highly recommend this reflection.

But I am still taking measures to make the house sexy like Michael Phelps, so this week was the Paint-a-thon as mentioned.  Here are some before and afters so far!

Living room:

Kitchen:

Bedroom:

The last picture is kind of crappy, but that’s sort of a plum on the walls.  I was just excited to take a picture of the pretty trees!

Now it’s back to DC for four (!) more days… tomorrow is transition session 1 of 2 with my successor at work, who in an awesome twist of fate is actually a good friend of ours! (Yo Maggie!) In all this hysteria it’s so nice to know my boss and colleagues are being left in terrific hands.  And then by this time next week we should be back here and all moved in… wagh!