Levi James, Packing And Other Stuff

I am so excited to show you my new grandson! Levi James Ryken was born on Thursday the 27th, 6 lb 6 oz. Look at all that dark hair!

Shauna had to have a c-section because Levi was breech. Brad wanted to stay with her in the hospital for the first night so Rich and I stayed with Maxwell  at their house.

We got to spend lots of quality time with him!!

They came home on Saturday.

Maxwell didn't sleep too well the first few nights but he's learning to love his little brother! I think they will be good friends!

We are scheduled to close on our Canton house on Tuesday the 9th and close on our Plymouth house a few days after.

I have been packing quite a bit in the last few weeks and I have to say....we have a TON of boxes!

My oldest brother recently moved and he gave us a whole bunch of boxes that he didn't need anymore. There was so many they filled up the whole back of our Equinox, even being flattened. I thought we couldn't possibly have enough to fill all of the boxes but was I ever wrong!

Just packing up my china cabinet and the case where I have my momma and baby animal figurines displayed took up 9 of them!

Of course, everything is fragile (fra-gee-lay!) so I couldn't cram too much in one box, but still!

I have both of the spare room closets packed and most of the stuff in our master bedroom closet packed.

And we have been slowly bringing up boxes from the basement and putting them in the garage so they will be ready to go!

We have a lot of stuff going into a smaller place but I am confident I can store it all and it won't look too cluttered!

I have also been making lots of phone calls arranging insurances and talking to our realtor and banker and have been utilizing this thing we have at work called "The Phone Booth".

It's sound proof so you can make phone calls or have conversations with someone and it's completely private! I love it! It's been really handy with this selling and buying houses stuff I've been doing!

That's where we're at right now. Next time if everything goes well I'll be posting from the new place!

Until then......

Finally

We finally managed to sell our house. Not without some haggling and not without us finally having to say they either agree to buy the house as is or no deal! Ha! We gave them a little money towards closing because they are first time home buyers. I swear you give people an inch and they want a mile! Anyway, we got things settled and now our house is officially sold! Should be closing in about 4 weeks.

I feel kind of bad but not as bad as I did when we sold our first house.

This little 1125 sq.ft ranch was the house we bought in 1978 when were were married a year. We brought both of our babies home to it and lived in it until Shauna graduated from high school. We sold it in 1999 to move to our current house in Canton.

I really missed that house the first month or so after we moved. I kept a picture of it on the refrigerator for a long time.

Now after another living in this house for almost as long, we are moving on again!

This time we are moving into a manufactured home in a MH community called Plymouth Hills. It's about three miles from here and is basically a mobile home park with some manufactured homes thrown in!

Ours is 1,700 sq. ft. 3 bedrooms, 2 bathrooms manufactured home that is 4 years old.

Its on a corner lot with two big pine trees in front.

It's very open inside.

View from one end

View from front door

It's got a huge open island in the kitchen. We are going to close it off on this end that you see and use it to store pots and pans and other bake ware.

Behind that white door to the right of the island is this. A good size pantry.

I am having them remove all of the appliances and buying everything new! I'm really excited about that because in all of our 41 years married I have never had all new appliance! Once I get them in there the kitchen should look a lot more updated!

The master bedroom has a walk in closet.

 It's hard to tell in this pic but it's large enough to hold a dresser if we need to put it in there.

The master bathroom is "en suite" so there is no entrance to it except through the bedroom. That is at one end of the house and at the other end is the family room, two more bedrooms and another full bath.

bedrooms on either side of the bathroom

family room with built ins

It's the perfect size for us for right now. The fact that it's in a mobile home community isn't exactly what we first had in mind but it seems nice enough. It's a corner lot so we don't feel crammed in.

The down side is there there is no covered parking and considering we are leaving an attached garage that will take some getting used to! Plus there isn't enough parking to have large family get togethers anymore.



We have lots of plans for this new place.  I can't wait for this all to be over and it feels like home!

And of course here is my little Maxwell!

My heart and the joy of my life!

Next post I probably will be telling you all about my new grandson, who should be born by the end of this month!

Until then.......

(sigh)

Well, I thought this next post would be all about how we sold our house and the new place we would be moving to.

But...

Our house hasn't sold yet and we are probably going to lose our new place because they won't hold it forever!

We've had plenty of lookers and most of them seem to indicate the house needs a lot of updating. I think it's because there is a lot of wood trim around the windows and doors and also wood crown molding throughout the house. Nowadays people like white trim on everything.

I'm discouraged and stressed and depressed and just don't want to deal anymore!

We are probably going to be taking it off the market soon and trying again in the Spring.

If we do we will update some more but painting all that molding white is not going to happen! We'll just have to wait for the right person to come along!

We did replace this light fixture in the dining room.

I do like the new one better.

Anyway! That's all for the gloom and doom. I don't want to talk about it any more!

My work moved into our new facility two weeks ago. It was chaos for a few days but things are settling down now. My new desk is small but sufficient for what I need.

The table with my computer monitors raises and lowers so I can stand or sit!

The room where my desk is is right by a big sliding door to outside so it's very humid in there right now and I'm sure I will be freezing in the Winter! I can't move from room to room without swiping my badge, which sounds like no big deal but it can get pretty annoying.

But I can actually look out of a window!

And we do have a nice break room. There is two large refrigerators, a couple coffee machines, microwaves and an ice and water machine! Plus plenty of tables.

Best of all I don't have to take a bus anymore, which means that I can leave later in the morning and get home earlier in the afternoon! It's all good!!!

Maxwell got his first haircut. They took him to a place called Cookie Cutters Haircuts for Kids.

He sat on his dads lap and stayed still for a while but he has the attention span of a 18 month old so she had to be quick!

He looks so cute though and they saved his curls!

I took a day off last week to babysit him and he was helping himself to my Fruit and Chia Cup! He had chia seeds stuck everywhere!

He also likes to hide behind doors!

He is without a doubt the joy of my life!

Everything is going good with Shauna's pregnancy! She's at 28 weeks now! Can't wait to meet our new little guy!

That's all for now...

Thanks for the listening ear!

For Sale

Well, our house has been on the market since Monday afternoon.

As of today, Saturday, we've had 4 showings so far. We have another one scheduled for this evening and one scheduled for Sunday. Then maybe we'll get an offer or two!

It's a little bit of a process to get our house ready for people to look at it. Mainly because of the cats. We don't want to hide the fact that we have cats but we do like to hide their litter boxes whenever someone is looking at our house.  Luckily their litter boxes are actually storage totes with holes cut in them, so they are easy to disguise as packed up stuff. like so:

Then we also have to make sure that we clean every surface of cat hair. Plus we pile all of their beds on a shelf in the basement, not hidden but not scattered all over the house like usual.

Besides the cat stuff we also make sure that there are no dishes in the sink, dishrags hanging on the faucets, all the floors are swept, rugs straightened out, kitchen and bathroom faucets and mirrors cleaned. Plus we take any prescription medications with us when we go.

Lastly we have to get Max the cat in the car with us. All the other cats will run and hide when a stranger comes in the house, but he loves people and will follow them around asking to be petted!

So he has to come with us!

He doesn't like being in the car at all, especially when it's moving. We chose not to put him in a carrier because he's a big cat and would be very uncomfortable cramped in one for up to two hours at a time. He's good being free in the car, though. Mostly he just lays on the floor in the back seat and meows pitifully!

In other news, my work department is relocating out of the main hospital to a big research complex in the North Campus., about 3 miles closer to home. This is our last week in the hospital. On Friday morning we will pack up all our stuff and after lunch they will transfer our phones. 

It's going to be chaos for a while but it's a nice facility. It's been completely redone and everything is brand new. But the best part is after almost 15 years I will no longer have to take a bus from my parking spot into work!

Lastly here is a pic of Maxwell and Shauna,

My loves!

Hopefully next time I will have some good news about out house being sold!

Until then.....

House Stuff Continues

We  are finally getting to the finish line with all the work we have been doing to this house.

Some things we did I did not take pictures of:

Repaired sagging drywall on the ceiling of the dinette area. We had a leak in the upstairs bath toilet which caused the drywall to get wet and sag. It sat there for more years than I want to admit because it's embarrassing. But alas, potential buyers would not appreciate it.  Rich got a quote from a company about having it replaced and it was over $700 so he did it himself. He did a good job, too!

Replaced some landscaping bricks that were crumbled and trimmed or cut down a lot of bushes. Our next door neighbors don't take care of their property very well. He only runs the lawnmower when the grass gets too long but doesn't trim anything. They have bushes on their property line that were growing on to our property an looked messy so Rich cut them back. Bags and bags of branches and leaves!

We have two furnaces in our house. One for the main house and a smaller one for the large added on family room. The heating part of the smaller furnace hasn't worked in a few years and we have been using space heaters in the winter. But once again, that would be something that potential buyers would not appreciate so we called a furnace company. They came out and it cost us $132 for them to tell us that the thermostat was bad and it would cost us $650 to replace it! Well their thermostats must be lined in gold because I went to the hardware store and bought one for $25 and Rich installed it. It's not fancy but it is programmable so it's perfect!  Jeez!

Rich repaired a some cracks in our driveway and patio. This is one of the longest.

This was the widest in the back off of the patio.

We actually did do something for ourselves too. This dining room set was my grandmothers.

We plan on taking getting rid of our dinette set and taking this one with us when we move. The chairs used to be covered with blue checked material.

It was nice when we had the blue carpet in that room but they were hard to keep clean and a cat hair magnet!

So we replaced the cushion covers with black vinyl.

They look much better and will go well in the new place we will be moving to. Plus, no more cat hair!

More on the new place later....I don't want to jinx it!

And of course, here is my usual picture of Maxwell.

Static cling! His dad put this picture on SnapChat!

Well, next time I update our house should be on the market and I'll be able to tell you about the new place.

Until then.........

House and Other Stuff

D-day for listing our house is getting closer!

Scott, our realtor came and told us some things to do to our house to get it ready to sell.  He's coming back on July 3rd with papers to sign and then the house will go on the market 4 days after that.

I took last week off of work so I could spend the week getting things ready.

We took a couple old TV's, fluorescent light bulbs, paint and other chemicals to a Hazardous Waste collection day they were having for all of Wayne County. Wayne County is huge and we waited 2 hours to drop off our stuff.

This is where we were in the line after about 1-1/2 hours. Worth the wait though. We got rid of a lot of stuff!

So I had a busy week off while we took care of a lot of little and not so little things.

Touched up the paint on the front door and added this little decoration.

Replaced the screens on the front screen door, the door wall and a few of the windows.

Replaced the stopper for the bathtub upstairs which hasn't worked in years. I bought this nifty little thing off of Amazon and it was exactly what we needed.

It works perfectly. We glued it down with the adhesive that came with it and after 24 hours it was stuck fast! Just push down and it stops the water and pull up to drain. It even has a hair catcher underneath!

Rich put a linoleum floor over the existing falling apart tile floor of the bathroom in the basement.

Before:

After:

I have cleaned out every cabinet, drawer and closet in the place and packed,  donated or thrown away a ton of stuff.

We still have a few more things to do before the house goes up for sale but I have to say that I am enjoying the nice clean cupboards and closets and all the little repairs that we have done.

Of course we spent a day with Maxwell too! Took him to the local park so we could see the ducks!

And run around on a gazebo!

That's it for now!

Until the next time.