Tom blew up the furnace.

Kind of.

He had to switch out our Nest and so he had been smart and took a picture of the wire setup…but for whatever reason his phone screwed up and he didn’t actually get the picture… So he was watching YouTube and winging it and it wasn’t working and the next thing he tells me is that something blew up (?!) or was burned or something in the basement.

WHAAAA—?!?!

I guess it could have been completely random but the timing was too perfect. So we had to call someone to come check it. So the poor cleaning lady had no AC for most of the time so it was probably 85° in the house (though it could have been much worse considering how hot it was). Thankfully the guy could come in two hours and it was just a $70 blown transformer and a $70 service call.

Good times.

Yes, I placed an ad for friends!!!

So I might have just posted a “We just moved in! Who wants to be our new neighborhood friends?!” get-to-know-us post on Nextdoor and Facebook (in a local Mom’s group). YIKES! A TOTALLY Jen thing to do though, right?! I had no idea what to expect… but (fast forward) it has been amazing!


Well it went over smashingly! By the time I was able to check back in I had four Facebook messages waiting for me and a bunch of comments saying what a great idea it was and they wished they’d thought of it, etc.

I think I added at least 10 new Facebook friends today. We have a socially distant park game planned for Sunday night with two families and someone is coming over for a driveway drink tomorrow.

A FEW DAYS LATER…

I was TOTALLY blown away by the responses. They just kept coming and coming. I think I’ve friended about 20 people now and have met probably 10 people in person thus far!! This might have been one of the best things I’ve ever done! We’ve felt so welcomed in this neighborhood it’s been amazing!!

I’m exhausted and I haven’t even really done that much today.

I can’t imagine how tired our movers are because they’ve been busting their asses since 8am. (Normally they load in one day and then unload the next day but the boss wanted it all done today!)

A huge thank you to Anna—my saving grace—taking the dog AND kids out of my hair ALL DAY. We’re also sleeping there tonight since the plans have changed about right times today and it will just be easier to stay there.

There is a tiny bit left for tomorrow so I’ll be back at it at 8am…and Tom will be back at work after his half day today (which was soooo nice).

We haven’t had a moving truck this small in 20 years!

So we obviously aren’t used to a smaller truck but we’re doing it a bit different today—loading some then taking it over and unloading, repeating until done. Since it’s not a multi-state move they don’t need to load absolutely everything at once.

I’m a bit anxious doing something totally different this time around but they said it should go quicker and we should have everything in our new house today. Normally it’s a two day process.

Here we go!

Why not look good on day three of moving?

I washed my hair today and tried a bun again and it looked horrible. I guess a bun only works for me on days-old hair…?! We’ll see what happens as the day wears on. 

Anyhoo. Guess what? Sandstone Pearl Shimmer and….Sunbaked Shimmer today. And it’s glorious. But no lipstick today because I don’t even want to think about it.

I kind of lost it today.

I was being so good planning what to keep out, which food was here and there, and packing some pans and plates and stuff for the new house…

Totally forgot about here.

I kept plates but nothing else. I was thinking the dishwasher had clean dishes in it…but I forgot we unloaded it. So it’s been a scramble…and we went to Anna’s for dinner.

We have two spoons and bowls for the kids’ breakfast, we’ll order food for lunch (we always do for workers), and then Chinese take out for dinner.

Moving fun #31 —Refrigerator move day.

A simple thing like unhooking the refrigerator turns to shit because the water valve doesn’t turn off to the fridge so we had a mad dash to find buckets and we had to turn off the water to the house and it still leaks. Only then did Tom remember from three years ago that there’s ANOTHER valve in the basement. What next?!

The calm before the storm.

Tom’s been at the new house painting the garage this morning (finishing up since his paint sprayer died last night and we had to buy a new one 😒) and I’ve been up since 5:30 but just getting rolling around the old house. Today we move the fridges around and it’s a logistical nightmare. My job is to fill the coolers with everything I think we won’t need in the next week to move to the new house.

Anyway. I did my makeup today to keep some semblance of normalcy.

Love on a military kid. It’s worth it. I promise.

Yes, yes, a thousand times yes. Every three years I get extreme mom guilt ripping my kids away from their good friends and wondering if and when they will meet new friends.

From Kayln Silva on Facebook:

I was talking to a civilian friend this morning and we were agreeing how hard it is to say goodbye to military families, and she jokingly says, yeah I always tell my kids don’t get too close because you know what will happen!! They just move away!!!

And with that my heart just sank, I know she was kidding and I know what she means, because she doesn’t understand, but I beg you please please don’t ever view military kids like this.

Please don’t distance yourself from them because it’s just a matter of time before they’re gone….again.

If we walk around this life viewing every relationship like that how would we get close to anyone? I understand this life is unique, and most military families jump into each new adventure with both feet, but for the rest of the world watching us, know that it’s hard.

Really hard. It breaks my heart every time we have to say good bye to yet another friend, someone they’ve connected with and someone they‘ve cared about.

If you have the opportunity to know a military child, please take a moment to realize that the constant state of transitions and unknowns is tough. We smile and laugh and make the most of every day we are together because the reality is, it very well could be. You never know when orders drop, or news comes that someone is moving away.

If you know a military child, take the time to hug them, understand them, invest in them.

Whether they are here for a few months or 4 years, to know that someone genuinely cares about them means so much to their little hearts 💕

PLEASE be that one person for someone.

“One person can instantly make you feel unalone, uninvisible … like you belong.”

This is the one thing I hope for with every. single. move. Sometimes it happens more quickly than others. Sometimes it never happens at all. But when it does, life is SOOOO much better. PLEASE be that one person for someone.

Am I invisible? One mom’s pain-relieving response to being excluded

This is how unpacking goes. 

I start working on the upstairs hallway closet which leads me to take stuff to our MBA which leads me to put stuff away in the kids bath which then leads me to see Owen’s room needs attention where I find a box of guest room bedding so now I’m working on the guest room and the hall closet looks like this. It feels like I’m spinning my wheels. 

 

OMG this house. THIS HOUSE.

Ugh. UGH.

I knew this house wasn’t perfect (I don’t think we’ve had a perfect house yet) but it’s always SOOO surprising the little things that are annoying as hell once you actually move in and start trying to unpack.

Here, it’s like the past tenants (actually the owners) didn’t actually live here and use things. Burnt out lights, outlets that don’t work, a ceiling fan so unbalanced the chains jingle loudly on every rotation, cabinet doors that can’t open because the fridge is too high (they actually hacked away part of the bottom of one cabinet so they could open the door halfway), and the fridge placed badly (the spot isn’t big enough for newer fridges) so that one side door can’t fully open and the nearby drawers and cabinets can’t fully open (and there’s obviously no other place to have it).

Let’s see. What else.

Katie’s “touched up” pink room looked like this:

[Note: Long story short, they’re coming to repaint. The owner had no idea what it looked like. His painter used the old paint and when it was wet it matched.]

The living room was “touched up” in the same manner:

Behind the stove (which we had to pull out because they left it unplugged):

The owners “cleaned” (I’m guessing just a basic surface clean) but there seemed to be YEARS worth of grime and food bits stuck on every surface and into the stove crevices. I really didn’t expect to have to deep clean my kitchen… But I mean, look at this. Barf. /shudder I literally almost vomited trying to clean this.

The cabinets and drawers were also all sticky and had disgusting peeling cracked liner on them. We pulled off some of the liners because they were more disgusting then the shelves underneath…but both were still sticky. It was at this point I decided to hire someone…who spent THREE HOURS (with help from her daughter) deep cleaning a 10×10 kitchen. Yikes, I know. (Mad props to my awesome neighbor who had a cleaning lady who could come ASAP.)

Moving on.

The MBR closet racks look good but are somewhat useless in practice. None are tall enough for my dresses, the door can’t open all the way when filled with clothes, and there’s a useless knee-high shelf—I was excited to see a shelf but if you hang clothes on the rod above it, they reach the shelf. The light was also super old, not bright in any sense, and made a loud humming noise.

There’s about 164 different types of light switches, dimmers, slides, knobs, timers, etc., none of which are where you’d expect them to be and all of which are old.

The washer is nice, but…more cleaning required.

Every single outlet is sideways. [Note: I’ve learned that this is apparently an Illinois thing.]

Whoever stained the kitchen cabinets just left the appliances in place so the sides of everything are stained as well (which you can also see in that disgusting stove pic above).

Whoever stained the privacy fence didn’t protect the windows so there are tiny stain dots on them which we’ll have to clean because it will drive me insane to look out through them for three years.

We were happy to see they left a hose and reel. Except when we went to use it we saw it was a water-powered reel that was broken and completely useless so now we have to get rid of it.

They left a crap ton of leftover tiles, wood flooring, etc. in a jumbled mess in the basement which we get to clean up if we want to use the space.

There’s an annoying step on the first level (seriously, whoever designed it was an idiot—there is NO good reason for the step) that not only is annoying but is also slightly higher than a normal step height and is constantly causing us issues. Owen even noticed it was higher than normal.

The stairwell to the basement is a 180° switchback so it’s impossible to get anything big (like a refrigerator or a couch) down there.

There are about four different type of blinds throughout the house. Nothing matches. And some windows don’t have blinds at all. Same with curtain rods. Some rooms have them (but they’re not even basic curtain rods), some don’t.

The vents in the MBR are placed so that our king bed/head board/frame and/or nightstand sits directly on top of it—not over it, like we could use a vent deflector, but actually ON it—so that to avoid that (it’s too heavy) we have to put the bed right up against the wall (which we learned won’t work because every time you roll over it runs against the wall and makes noise) or pull it out about 8″ away from the wall which takes away walkway space and makes lots of unusable room. As it is now, we managed to get the bed placed beside the vents but then our nightstands are about 8″ away from the bed.

And silly/minor things like this:

Tub parts just sitting in the tub:

Fixes by a homeowner who isn’t handy (on the front porch):

A bunch of these door stops are missing. So we either replace them/ask for the landlord to replace them or risk ruining doors.

Missing storm door lock.

The master bedroom closet light that is so dim it’s useless. Now with bugs and a loud humming noise! (We’ve already bought the replacement light.)

 
  
I spent probably an hour cleaning the sliding door tracks. They were SO crusted with gunk I’m surprised the door even opened. I was using vinegar and baking soda, a toothbrush, toothpicks, and probably a whole roll of paper towels to get it all out.

Oh! I forgot! They fixed a few broken tiles and apparently also regrouted the whole floor…but did it wrong and it just crumbles like dirt. Fail! [Note: the landlord has decided to replace the entire floor with wood. It was too short notice to do it while we were planning to be gone so he’s going to have it done over Christmas while we’re away.]

And there is one single outlet in the entire garage. One. So we have an electrician coming and all I see are dollar signs…

Breathe.
Breathe.
Breathe.

My shirt says it all.

So overall the move-in went well. We thought the house felt full before they even got here…so halfway through unloading it was really full… And at the end they were saying “This says boys room but it’s full. This says kitchen but it’s full.” 😂 The basement looked huge when we started. Ha. Haha.

The topper might be the awesome living room set we got from Julie that I was super excited about (because we haven’t had a matching set of furniture in forever) and… The room is just too small for the oversized pieces. 😭 So now the unpacking “fun” starts. Normally I like this part but not when I know it all won’t fit. Cheers!!