Moving on up

Well, the house is ours! After signing enough paperwork to have killed off an entire tropical rain forest, we are now the proud owners of our very own home. I love the thought of having a house that is truly our own. On the other hand, I'm also slightly apprehensive about the fact that when something breaks, we're actually going to have to fix it ourselves. Thank heavens for husbands I suppose:)

I've discovered, once again, that moving or redecorating really does not change when you move to another country. Somehow I had hoped that with the US being known for having the easy solution to everything (drive-thru banking and drive-thru goodwill drop-off being my two favorites), that certain irksome aspects of moving house would be less of a hassle. Well, I was wrong. The primer in my hair, the aches in my back and arms, and the wallpaper piece that just won't come off my knee are a living proof to that statement.

Sure, we don't use steamers here to remove wallpaper, but scraping it off using merely an odd blue gel and a razor isn't a whole lot better. Especially when you're dealing with vinyl fruit-patterned wallpaper that the previous owners were that attached to that they appeared to have used at least a bucket of glue per strip. At one point, when the blue gel is all over the wall and the trim, and the wallpaper is still coming off in pieces the size of your fingernails, you feel just as frustrated as when the whole room is filled with steam, and all that is happening is that your hair has begun to resemble something from the 1970s.
We had calculated one afternoon for taking care of the hideous wallpaper in the kitchen; after all, it was only only a section underneath a chair rail and a trim by the ceiling. We grossly underestimated the activity; it ended up taking over twelve hours, with gel on every imaginable surface, and tiny pieces of curled wallpaper covered the entire kitchen floor. However, I am proud to say that our marriage is still doing great, and the end result is absolutely worth it. We used a monsoon green glossy paint for the section above the white chair rail, and a gray summer white for the section underneath the rail. My husband describes it as Florida-style while I like to think of it as a Provencal-themed kitchen. Take your pick I would say; either way, after adding new knobs to the kitchen cabinets, and removing the floral patterned valences, we are now the proud owners of a truly pimped-up kitchen.

Just like every other move, we have also become regulars at our local home improvement store. In the past it may have been the local Kaufland, or the Gamma, this time it's Lowe's. And just like all the previous times, we still ended up going back at least three times a day, covered in paint, or wallpaper, or primer, or all three. I feel like I've gotten to know all the different people who work at the paint desk, and I even have my favorites. The one main advantage of working on your home here in the US are the store hours. I can't count the times I needed a few simple screws or some spackle, only to find the store had closed hours before. This time, when we realized a few of our new tarnished silver kitchen knobs needed screws that were just a hair longer at seven last night, Lowe's was still open, and bustling with activity.

For now, all of our painting and priming is done. Obviously, there are still projects left for after we're all moved in, but since two major ones include removing wallpaper (in the two bathrooms this time), we're perfectly fine with putting it off. Right now we're waiting on the floors to be done, and then it's just a matter of moving our stuff from one place to the next. I'm pretty sure that is going to be just as much hard work as it is anywhere else, but I'm hopeful, and will keep you posted. .