Work and Play at the House

We've spent quite a bit of time at the house the past few weeks cleaning and painting. Finally we're starting to see it all pay off. It smells like fresh paint and new carpet instead of wet dog and cigarette smoke.

Here's the living room with new carpet and new curtains (and a lot of space for the boys to run around). We don't have much furniture to put up here yet, so for a while it's going to be the room where we play soccer and have dance parties.


Casey took this sweet photo of Chris and Darby.


Casey thinks the fireplace is a great place to play cars (not when it's on). It's gas-powered, so we can just flip a switch and have a nice fire. Casey's very cautious around anything we tell him is hot, so really we just have to worry about Darby getting too close.


We put Darby to work cleaning the kitchen. I'll probably re-sweep that floor later.


All that sweeping was hard work, I guess. Time for a break. (Hey, you can see the old carpet in this photo--heavily-stained grayish berber. Yuck.)



The boys enjoy a snack.


Back at the apartment, we're making sure to pack all the important stuff, boys and cats included.

Think "horror movie"

How bad is the dust in the new house?  See this post's title.

It's actually not nearly that bad overall, but you know what people don't touch ever again after installation? Ceiling fans. I did my best to clean a couple of them this weekend, and every first sweep of an arm would produce an impressive cloud of dust. I learned quickly to shield my eyes and to push the debris away from myself. But it left a pretty good pile of dust bunnies under the ladder.

Casey had been playing on his own but finally wandered into the room to see what I was up to. Immediately he drew up short at the sight of the dust piles.

"Daddy, what's this? What's this, Daddy?" (I hear that constantly -- always the repeated question, asked symmetrically.)

I told him they were dust piles and that they fell off the ceiling, etc. He studied them carefully while I scrubbed down a door.

"Yucky!" he announced.

"Yucky, you're right," I said.

"Daddy, I think this one's moving a little bit."

EEP.