New Beginnings: Day One

I'm a bad, bad person, and did not take any pictures of Day One in the new house. And I suppose technically yesterday was Day One, since that's when we officially signed our lives away and received the keys to our new home. BUT, today was the first day we were in it after receiving those keys, and even though it was hard work, it was AWESOME.

We changed locks, and cleaned, cleaned, cleaned. I think I would have made my mother very proud today. I went into the house armed with two boxes of Mr. Clean Magic Erasers, a brand new mop and bucket, Easy Off oven cleaner, various household cleaners, two rolls of paper towels and a large container of bleach. I washed walls for crying out loud, even though we are going to paint right over them. I cleaned windows, inside and out. (Something I've never been able to do living in second and third floor apartments. It's interesting, being able to see outside without a thin film of dirt, grime and rain spots.) I cleaned light fixtures. I mean, I actually made Tim take the plastic cover off the huge fluorescent light in the kitchen because it was icky. And once it was clean I realized that the kitchen was not supposed to have an eerie yellow glow, but that the cover was well beyond icky. I tore down wallpaper, I cleaned cabinets, I scrubbed doors, I bleached the crap out of all the surfaces that bleach is safe for. I mopped the entire house three times. and I can guarantee that number will multiply by leaps and bounds before we even move in. I evicted dozens of spiders, all the while yelling, "You don't live here anymore! This is my house now. Be gone with you, and tell your friends that this house is no longer vacant! I have a broom and a can of raid, and I am extremely adept at using both!" I swept up countless cockroach (excuse me, Palmetto bug) carcasses and many more legs. (What's that about? Do cockroaches shed legs periodically? Because there were an awful lot more legs than there were bodies. That's what I should have taken pictures of.)

So, overall, the house is pretty clean. And at the end of the day, we don't have a very daunting to-do list:

• Replace front screen door. (Tim was going to replace the missing screen in the door, but the longer he looked at it, he decided it would be well worth it to make another trip to Home Depot and replace the whole damn door.)
• Paint. Paint. Paint! We thought we were going to get away with painting only the kitchen and 2 of the 3 bedrooms. Natch. The entire house needs to be painted. Everything is ugly colored, badly painted, and it appears that the previous owners (probably upon learning that they were being foreclosed upon) allowed their small children to run through the house wielding permanent magic markers. And the master bathroom is PINK. Still not sure how I missed that the first time around, but friends, I don't do pink.
• Replace garbage disposal.
• Hang ceiling fan in the big gaping hole in the living room ceiling.
• Replace toilet seats. Why? Do you seriously need to ask why?
• Figure out how to make the alarm stop beeping incessantly every other minute. There's no way I can live with that, but you know the second I call the alarm company to find out how to disarm it, they are going to suck me in with some safety sales pitch, and before you know it I'm going to be a home owner with an alarm system that I will probably set off every time I come home for the first six months after it is functional.
• Buy refrigerator. Small detail.

And so tomorrow will be another big day. We are going shopping for paint (yay!) and returning the toilet seats I already bought because I was absolutely convinced the toilet seats were round. (Nope. Oblong. Oval. Whatever the weird shape is.) I'm probably going to clean the house again, because why not? I need to evict the foreclosure germs and get my own good karma in there. Then, as if all that weren't enough, we have to start packing. As if I want to do anything in my crappy apartment now. It pains me to even be sitting in it when I have a perfectly good house less than five miles away.

So, I promise to try and remember to take pictures tomorrow, of the new house and the destruction area that will soon be my apartment. One of the things I am looking forward to the most? Watching Hades, Azrael and Loki flip right out the first time they try to hightail it away from one another with no carpet to grip. It's going to be like 3 little Bambi's on ice, and it is going to be hysterical. I'm not mean, I just take my amusement where I can get it.

And it is only Day One. Stay tuned for Days Two through Nine. I will probably only keep an official record until we are all moved and settled in, and I plan for that to be next Sunday.

Hell, yes I'm ambitious.