I think I’m in love

I’m already married, right? Well if I wasn’t I think I’d be halfway to in love right now.

With the electrician.

Yeah, he was here. Yeah, he fixed the main breaker. (Wait till I upload the pics.) Yeah, he explained a few things that made us go “ooohhhhh… that’s why it was so freaky…”

So tonight we relax a bit and tomorrow we finish up.

I think it may win

Remember how sometimes in the past I’ve written a blog post and you, the audience, are incredulous and amazed? And this one time, one of my friend even said “Just when I thought it couldn’t get any worse – it DID!”

Actually, I’m kind of shaking my head and laughing, since at this point we’ve been through a LOT and really this is just par for the course now, you know? At any rate, I’ll squash my flair for the dramatic and get on with the storytelling.

I think it was Thursday, late in the day. Ron was working on the septic field part, and the pump we’re installing. It need a plug, and all he had to do was run the wire, plop in a new breaker on the panel and hook it up. Pretty straightforward.

Except, you know, this is our house.

I mean, he did it right – it’s one of those things you either know how to do or you don’t, and if you know how to do it, it’s pretty hard to screw it up barring any ambulance showing up. But apparently just touching the electrical panel has set off a cascade of events to highlight every single ineffective and jerry-rigged piece of wiring in the entire house.

First, the entire right side of the panel kept shutting off. Just the right side. Fearing faulty breakers, Ron replaced a few of them on that side. Great – now we are at the point where at least more than half the house isn’t dark.

Now we’re stuck in the kitchen – a room that has 4 plug sockets, not including the one for the stove, where almost every one is on a different circuit. Every one of them is acting up. Including the stove, which is an entirely different voltage. It works, the clock is on, but now burners and the oven randomly shut down.

The plug behind the fridge has a new plug socket and the wire runs straight from it to the panel. It can’t keep a light on for more than a few seconds.

My office here was on the side of the panel shutting down. Weirdly enough, our bedroom is on the other side, so we’ve run an extension cord from there to here so at least we can work without things going *pouf* like they did a few times on Friday.

We’re waiting for the second electrician to call us back. Our phone was out too.

My mom says the house is winning. We kinda sorta joked before that we’d have to replace all the wiring in the house, and it’s looking like a reality.

As big as a whole shop

It’s bigger than I thought. My etsy/ebay/to sell pile that is.

See, in addition to the purging items I don’t want, some of it has been hitting another pile labeled “to sell on the internet”. Mostly destined for Etsy, but some for ebay.

I decided to do a “quick” sort of the to-sell stuff and make two piles. It was scattered around in boxes, and as I lugged each one into my craft room, it got bigger and bigger. I was laying out the “to fix” pile so I could take a picture. The “to fix” pile is any item that needs washing, repairs, a retrofit, or made up into some sort of goods (usually a tote bag) before I could list it.

I lost my floor again.

The whole time I was plowing through it all, the only thing I could think of was apologizing to the husband. You see, as we were taking things *out* of the house, a lot of my scoping out of yard sales and thrift stores has been with an eye for what sells online. (I’m not just guessing here, I’m paying attention to trends, picking up one or two to check out when I get home, and if I hit gold, grab more next time I see some.) So for that past couple of years – especially since we moved, although it started before then, I’ve been amassing things to sell online. In the words of my husband, “We’re supposed to be getting RID of things, not bringing new things IN to the house!”

I did have good plans, I was building a site to sell my own goods from, like my own etsy, run by me. Well, honestly at this point, I haven’t done squat except tear it down and partially rebuild it, twice. Plus I don’t have the time to market it. A slight change in plans, and this past week or two I signed up on etsy, plus listed a few things on ebay – just to start things off.

Well, looking at the stack of items and realizing I could stock a small storefront tells me I’d better get cracking.

And Ron was right. (I hate when that happens.) No more yard sales for me until I make a dent in the pile. I’m feeling especially masochistic and wondering exactly how much I spent. Not all of it I bought; some is my old stuff, some inherited and willing to be let go of, and some just stuff people gave me. All told, I think there’s a good hundred dollars of investment there.

In yard sale prices, that’s quite a pile.

A small list for the curious:
- 28 items of clothing, 16 of them dresses, 21 of the items are vintage
- 6 aprons
- 73 books
- 18 linens of some sort
- 64 patterns, most 30 + years old
- 20 + different craft supply items (in my own defense, some of this is yet more leftovers from my craft store, which has been closed for 6 years)

I’ll be allocating time on the weekends to list items, rather than go yard sailing. And yes I *am* embarrassed with myself.

The living room is clean

Not that the job being down is in itself a reason to blog, but it left me wondering a few things.

How can we get so much stuff *in* there?
Why does all the dirt then collect itself on me?
Why don’t I do it more often?

Oh yeah, it’s exhausting, dusty (I’m allergic), makes me feel like crap, and gets me cranky.

But at least this time my abdomen did not hurt and I wanted to clean up. Maybe I’m finally “better”.

I’m sure there’s another point I wanted to make when I started this post, but I’ve since forgotten it. Meanwhile, the study – the room next to the living room – is an absolute disaster area. Since it’s holding the stuff that doesn’t belong in the lviing room. Oh yeah, now I remember! Does it strike anyone else that a large part of cleaning up is just shuffling items from one end of the house to the other?

How to have a happy home

This time last year, we bought this house. See how sad it was?

All cold and empty and neglected. Poor house. So we bought it – rescued it really, loving it and now fixing it up. Admittedly, we haven’t got very far yet and there’s still boxes everywhere. But look at it now.

Doesn’t it look happer? I mean, even despite the better lighting and the still-falling-apart-ness.

I love you house. It’s okay, we’ll have you all better as soon as we can. Starting when the mountain of snow melts. (We’ve made lists. Lots of them.)

Now we can really settle in

Boy, I got pretty darn cheesy and sentimental in that last one. At any rate, our brains are now free of thinking of the last house and we can move forward with this one, and all the other plans in my head. I mean, I don’t want to be looking back too wistfully so I can’t enjoy what’s in front of me now.

I mean, we did pick this house in this spot for some pretty good reasons. I’m uploading more pictures, so be sure to click on through to Flickr and check them out.

Ron and I are running errands today – in and out of the house, up and down the highway. He stopped in to the hardware store earlier to pick up a load of pellets. While there, he asked about window prices. We have a whole lot of them – 19 or 21 are all the same size, all original, all pretty darn cold what with the single pane of wavy glass. They are 2 feet by 5 feet. Large. They all need to be replaced. But the hardware store has a decent price for one, a lot less than we thought – about $300. That was the good news for today. (There’s 39 windows & exterior doors in total – most, if not all, will be replaced.)