Ten Years, Stuck on My Eyes

Soren, Asleep on the Back Porch
Outside Raleighwood, NC
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Going through my Flickr account I realized I don't have many photographs of our house. Other than the occasional "look how much snow we got!" shot, and pictures of the cats on the back porch (either sleeping or glaring at me for coming near them with that big camera lens), my house has not been a topic of photographic consideration. I should probably reconsider that.

Yesterday marked Ten Years since we moved into our home. That's the longest Bonn has lived in one place in her entire life. It's the longest I've lived anywhere since I moved out of my parents' house. It's been quite a decade for us.

When we first looked at the house we discovered that the doors leading from the screen-in back porch into the kitchen had been left unlocked. This gave us an early preview of the house and allowed us to start making a wish list of changes early on. Once we had electricity turned on to the house we started moving smaller things into the house. We spent the Saturday before moving in with a rented carpet cleaner, trying to get the stains and grime out before we could start adding our own.

We moved from an old farmhouse that came with an old metal-sided barn for storage. That barn was both a blessing and a curse, as we got into the habit of throwing very little away -- until it came time to pack it all up and move it to the new house. We loaded it all into the back of a long U-haul truck that I was able to drive to the house, but had to rely on one of the guys who was doing pre-agreed upon repair work on the place (who happened to be a former trucker) to back it down our narrow driveway and into the back yard… where we had another, smaller barn waiting to receive all of those boxes of stuff.

My lasting memory of moving in was that I took a week off from werk to work on the house. I figured a week should be enough to tear off the horrid wainscoting along the dining room wall, get the wallpaper off of the kitchen walls, get the kitchen repainted, the hallways repainted and the living room painted, and get the kitchen and the majority of the rooms organized. (I couldn't understand why the guys at werk laughed at my time assessment)

In reality, it took me a week to get the @#&%$! wallpaper off of the kitchen and dining room walls. (I swear, they must have put that fugly stuff up with superglue) On the last day of the week, I'd filled in all of the claw-teeth holes in the walls that had been scored into them by the tool we'd been assured would help get the adhesive disolving spray between the paper and the wall, thus allowing us to peel away the old wallpaper like magic. (Didn't work) Then I kicked everyone out of the house, set up all of the fans to blow air out to the back porch, and sanded down all of the walls.

Ah, the joys of homeownership.

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