Night-time prayers

(I know - I've exceeded my quota of posts for the month already... Tough.)

Excerpt from DW's prayer:
... Please help me to not have nightmares tonight and please help me to not remember any nightmares...

Excerpt from Snoozer's prayer:
... Please help me to have nightmares tonight and please help me to remember them so I can tell them to DW and Niccus...

Question from Niccus, between her prayer and Snoozer's:
Hey - why are you guys laughing at my prayer?!?

Surprise talks in Sacrament Meeting

A couple months ago after what seemed a typical Sunday morning of church preparation, I settled into my usual seat on our usual bench prepared for the typical activities of distracting children under four from making noise and helping children over four pay attention to the talks. After an unremarkable opening to the meeting I was startled out of my cluelessness when it was announced Pooka would be giving a talk in just a few minutes. I immediately turned my gob smacked head in Pooka's direction to quietly seek to inquire if it was truly so. She glanced my direction and kind of shrugged and then looked back toward the front of the chapel. In my panicked state I hadn't even noticed the smile that crept across her face as she tried to appear guilelessly surprised, so I interpreted her shrug as she intended: I thought that the announcement was the first she'd heard about it.
I didn't figure out that she'd tricked me until a few minutes later when she started her talk. She - as usual - was extremely well prepared and did an excellent job. Based on conversations afterward she'd only been concerned that she hadn't kept a straight enough face as she shrugged.

Our new Indiana Home

Our house went on the market just after the memorial day weekend, and we had an offer early in August. My employer about the same time decided they'd help out with relocation assistance, so things got slow for a few weeks to let the paperwork catch up with the real world. Wednesday we signed the papers. We'll be out of our current home on the 1st.

Initially we'd planned on renting for a few months after moving, but the current rental market is busy (to match the slow housing market) so most landlords would not consider leases less than a year - at least not those landlords who would rent to a family of ten! So in the last couple weeks our plans have changed quickly.

Just before Labor day I spent a day looking for houses between Denmark and New Jersey. (Those were the locations I visited before and after my first day of searching - not the geographical limits of my search.) After looking at the cheapest stuff that seemed like it would fit and finding it unacceptable Pooka and I returned 12 days later to continue the search.

One of the complications of being allergic to spending money is that searching for a new home requires repeated reinforcement of the fact that inexpensive houses have low prices for good reasons. Most commonly in our new state - they stink. Literally. Due either to mold, animals, or both. For homes that fit a family of ten inside and out the minimum price for not stinking seems to be 87% of the median listing price.

Even some that didn't stink had issues. Like the very expensive house at the top of a cliff that was in the process of slowly moving to lower elevation. Or the very nice older home with a cellar that was slowly destroying the structure with excess moisture. Or the home with very deep shag carpets - that used to house a cat.

A week ago in Minnesota a local real estate radio show indicated that homeowners selling at the median home price or a little more were getting good value for the money while the higher priced homes were much harder to sell so there was considerable value for those selling on the lower end and moving up to the higher end. We found the same was true in Indiana.

We picked a home and made an offer after 2 days of searching. Because we were planning on flying home after the 3rd day we gave the sellers only 24 hours to consider the offer. In Minnesota the last time we purchased a home our agent gave the seller only 6 hours - but things move more slowly in Indiana. I felt like I was twisting arms to get less than 48 hours, but it made clear to the seller's agent that our agent's comments that we were ready to place an offer on another home if this offer didn't work out were based in reality.

Even knowing we'd hear in less than 24 hours didn't make the wait pleasant. Talking to a friend much more experienced in real estate transactions helped Pooka gain confidence that we were in good shape, but I was still anxious the next morning.

That friend's husband had earlier commented, "You have only one chance to low-ball." Not meaning that you'd offend the seller so much that they'd never talk to you again, but that you can almost never reasonably go lower than your first offer. The whole idea is something I think my agent would see as heretical.

Still, the home we made an offer on had been on the market for 256 days and the price had been dropped once already. With the general slowness of the market in our new state we made an offer that was low. We were confident we could get a similar home in the same neighborhood for much less if the seller on our first choice wouldn't meet us on price.

The seller came back with a counter-offer very close to our original offer. We accepted their counter and will be moving in early next month to a place with twice as much room and 6 times the land of our current home in Minnesota. So if ya'll don't yet have plans for Thanksgiving, we have space for you!

Home staging, or making trash look like a million bucks.

I started this post some time ago but just got the pictures in today...

We've made progress on the refinishing, and the dejunking, and the painting.

One of the large projects was the kitchen. Although I can see all the flaws in workmanship, others - including our Realtor - have raved over the results.
After we'd progressed most of the way in refinishing (and maybe halfway in dejunking) the intensity of my travel schedule increased sharply. While I was gone on my first trip this month to the land of papa's father's birth I received an urgent email from Pooka asking about a major furniture purchase for our front room.

I couldn't see the point. Our front room furniture, consisting of a well fingerprinted beautiful black piano and two large green leather couches, are the most expensive pieces we've ever ever ever owned. (Obvious to many of you - we didn't purchase any of them. We just somehow manage to look needy enough that people give us stuff when they move away or when they inherit an instrument they don't play.) So I thought the ensemble was as good a shot at making a front room look nice as we could reasonably make. But Pooka knew better.

She knew better not just because she is a visionary woman, but because she'd studied it out and had decided that the family room couches had to go. They had three strikes against them. First, they were worn. Second, they needed steam cleaning ($160). And third, they were blue. The third strike was the worst!

Maybe it was good that I was away. By the time I returned home I'd realized that we'd spent almost as much on a kitchen floor as Pooka was proposing for new front room furniture. And that anything we purchased would likely go with us. (Note to self: remember to leave kitchen floor when moving.) And that showing a home was a large enough source of stress that it was worth the difference just to improve Pooka's peace of mind.

So we ordered the new furniture, moved one set of couches, had Goodwill reject the other set, and cleared *everything* off our mantle. (This last is no small feat. The mantle served as the shelf for our DVD collection, Pooka's folk instrument collection, an array of trophies for sports and music, and as a sargasso for any item which ought to be kept from shorter residents.) We did get Goodwill to accept the blue couch after a scratch was repaired, but the loveseat was rejected because when the legs fell off I'd replaced them with 2x4's.

But this is the subject of this post. The loveseat was one of the pieces of trash. Normally it would have a value of negative $35, because we'd have to pay to have it hauled away. In this case it was disassembled. Most of the wood was burned and padding and fabric placed in the trash, but the back of the loveseat had a wooden ornament which formed the nucleus of our new headboard.


Another piece of trash is placed prominently in our front room between the two new chairs. It doesn't look like trash because Pooka has a nice set of tablecloths to drape over it and a fruitbowl full of apples on top of it. It's had better days and gone through a major repair. (For some reason it wasn't constructed strong enough to serve as a stage.) It joined our household after a long and useful life in someone else's and after several years of increasingly rickety service was slated for the burnpile along with the aforementioned couch parts.

Of course - as part of dejunking we had some help from our ward. Especially on the cleaning. But it is extremely important to be thorough in this kind of work so we got some additional helpers to take care of the crumbs:


Now you may think that the idea of dressing up a home with trash is a bit buggy, but all gussied up that trash does just fine.