we've closed, we've moved in, we've started working

wow, what a crazy week it's been! this is a short post just to chronicle a bit of what the last week has been; maybe we'll post some more in-depth stuff later.

tuesday: we closed on the house. the family who sold it brought five people along, and cut checks to each of them right there. thabo got into it with our mortgage broker for showing up with an undisclosed extra fee on our mortgage; he agreed to pay half "from his pocket." after four hours of paperwork, and forty two separate signatures, we got the keys to the house. that night, we went in to clean, and found many, many roaches on the first floor. we did some preliminary mopping, tried not to look too overwhelmed, set off bug bombs.




wednesday: we got a 20' truck, and moved two households of stuff to our new place. a TON of work. thank you to matt, shant, leigh anna, sylvia (and her friend from out of town) and the CSM crew for helping us; we wouldn't have madewn! a long day, with a break in the middle to let the exterminator in to continue waging war on the roaches. our first night in the new place...very noisy compared to the menno house back yard! the drains in the sinks and tubs barely drain.

















thursday and friday: i swept and mopped out the place, threw out lots of odds and ends. we set up a temporary kitchen on the fourth floor to use for a week or two.

saturday: we tore out the kitchen in the daylight basement apt., in an attempt to get the roaches out, and it felt really good to get it cleaned out. took out the drywall behind the kitchen unit, replaced some subfloor, took up the badly laid tile. thanks to thabo's dad for driving us to home depot for supplies. check out the pics below of the roach traps (we put these down, and this is how they looked within a couple of hours). that other disgusting photo is of roach eggs and dirt...yum!

sunday: replaced the locks on the outside doors, tore up the linoleum and exposed the wood floor on the fourth floor, and dug into the plumbing issues. pictures of the plumbing nightmare to follow soon, too. lots of stoppages, including toy rockets, a plastic straw, a large cake of detergent-looking stuff, and pipe corrosion. thank goodness home depot is close enough to walk to; two trips today. at home depot, a roach crawled off of me onto the cashier counter. we got the drains working much better in two of three bathrooms.

i think we're all reeling from the adjustment to living in a construction zone. thanks to mike and katrina for coming over on saturday, and being so encouraging. we really needed it!