Playing Catch Up

Well, it's been awhile since I have blogged so it's time to play major catch up!  Santiago has been working overtime almost every day including Saturdays, because of a new promotion at work.  It has been such a blessing for us, but has made our lives kinda crazy busy the last month or so with other stuff going on!  For starters, towards the beginning of August we decided to have our ceilings re-textured.  Santiago and my bro-in-law Mark took down the popcorn ceilings and put up a quick texture right before we moved into our house.  At the time that's all we could do, but we decided it was now time to have them professionally done.  We had plans to go on a camping trip the second weekend of August, and scheduled our contractor to start the Wednesday after we got back.   I needed to order new lighting for our house since everything was pretty much was still original.  That in itself was a stressful task, because I wanted everything to be from the same collection.  One of my biggest frustrations was that hardly any of the lighting collections were complete with a ceiling fan.  I finally found one that had everything so I ordered that before our camping trip, assuming that it would arrive after we got back.  Well, UPS had it scheduled to arrive on Friday by the end of the day, and we had plans to leave our house by 2 pm.  I was totally bummed out thinking that we might not be able to join our friends until late that night.  There was no way I was going to leave 7 boxes of lighting on our doorstep!  Thankfully we have a great next door neighbor who offered to pick them up for us.  We left our house about 3 and I got a text about 3:45 from UPS saying they were delivered at 3:09, so lame right?  By then we had no service so I just hoped that she checked our doorstep soon.  So, we got back from our camping trip on Sunday (which will be in a seperate post) and picked up our packages.  Monday and Tuesday I was left to basically prep the whole house for Wednesday.  Plus we were going to be staying at my parents while they were getting done, so I had to pack all of our bags.  Now originally we were told that they would be done by that Saturday, which would work out perfectly since Isaiah started school the following Monday.  By the time I was done all of the closets were stuffed, and all the was left was the furniture that Santiago needed to move to the garage.  Well...the whole project ended up being a bigger ordeal than we had expected.  We were at my parents for almost two weeks.  I used up two tanks of gas driving Isaiah back and forth from school (across town). The poor guy had to get up at 6:30 every morning so that we could leave in enough time.  I would drop him off, drive all the way back to my moms, then all the way back to pick him up, then back to her house.  And since Santiago was working late everyday and going over to the house to check on the progress, he wasn't getting back to my parents until the kids had to be in bed.  And to top it all off, one of our neigbors called the cops on our contractor around 9pm one night because they thought he had broken in.  The sheriff came in with his K-9 while he was up in the attic (running electrical for a new ceiling light) and scared him so bad he made a bigger hole in the ceiling.  The the cops came and it was just a big mess!  We finally couldn't take it any longer (not that my parents weren't great hosts) and moved back in before they were done.  We slept on the floor for a whole week until we could move the furniture back in.  The ceilings still need another coat of paint but we will do that a room at a time.  We painted the walls of the dining room and kitchen, and all of the other rooms still need touch up done.  Buying an older home takes so much time and money to update, but we are happy where we live.  It will eventually get there!