Lee and I certainly have our work cut out for us with our new house!  The projects seem endless.  Over the next several months to a year our home will undergo lots and lots of changes.  I've decided I want to document them week by week so I have a record of our efforts!

Week 1 (February 18 - 20)

All sorts of popcorn scraping! We have fabulous friends and over the weekend Alyson, Erika and Rachel joined the ceiling scraping party.  Their contributions saved us a total of 9 hours.  Thank you ladies!  By 10pm on Saturday night our house was acoustic ceiling free.  I'm sure we will be finding remnants though in all sorts of nooks and crannies for months.

Week 2 (February 21 -  February 27)

We started feeling the pressure this week of trying to get the most messy jobs over before moving in on the 27th.  We struggled between wanting to be at the house putting in all sorts of labor and needing to be at the apartment to pack.   The end result -- very little sleep!  Our accomplishments/efforts from the week are:

• Packed up all the boxes and brought them to the house every night that we went over to work.
• Purchased our first Washer and Dryer!  Ya-hoo!
• Painted our linen closet and washed out the nastiness from the master bedroom closet.
• Installed internet.
• Sanded - Spackled - Sanded Again the dining room, hallway and living room ceilings (HUGE job - Lee took Thursday and Friday off to do this! My husband is truly the greatest).
• TSPd and scrubbed from top to bottom the common bathroom (Thank you Rachel - I'll love you forever for that one!)
• TSPd and washed Living Room Walls (More thanks to Rachel)
• Scrubbed and cleaned the refrigerator (Yes - even more thanks to Rachel!)
• TSPd and washed the little bedroom and closet we will be sleeping in temporarily

We also had a marathon moving day on Saturday.  The men in our ward were incredible and carried all of our furniture out of our apartment and into the uHaul in just over an hour.  It's sort of staggering how much furniture Lee and I have accumulated in the last 18 months -- it didn't all fit in the one UHaul! Fortunately for us, we have another friend with a large truck and the guys from church helped us finish the job.  We had it all to Fremont and unloaded before 2pm.   And to top it off - Lee and I completely unloaded our storage unit.  All of our belongings are now in our new house!

I can't even begin to describe the chaos of our house.  Normally when one moves, one can start unpacking and settling in.   We are months away from that.  Given the sanding and the super efficient moving team - we still had an inch of ceiling dust throughout the entire house when we started unloading the trucks.  We dusted off enough to throw the mattress on the floor - but that was the extent of it. As we've been at the house this last week we realized how much work is required to get the bedrooms and living room up and functioning.  We can't even begin to move in until all those things are fixed.  So in the interim - we'll be living out of suitcases, trying to dodge the curtain-free windows while getting dressed.  Sunday morning as we got ready for church (we were 30 minutes late b/c we couldn't find anything) I got a kick out of watching Lee trip back and forth to the family room looking for clothes. His clothing and shoe combinations were comical.

What a crazy 10 days!!!