Nothing Happens At Ten

Now that we are in the house, I thought that I would post some reviews of the folks we dealt with to do this project. Some were great; some were OK; some were…. well…. horrid.

So, I will trickle out these reviews over the weeks. Keep in mind that I am not selling any of this. I am simply reporting our experiences with the people and services.

So here is the first one, PODS. The overall rating I give them is a thumbs up.

I was a bit leery of PODS when we started because they just seemed a bit too slick, but their service ended up being very useful for our move out of the old house. Being able to take a month to move our stored items from the house into the POD was just what we needed. If we had been required to pack trucks and move the stuff into self storage it would have taken much longer. Once the POD was in the driveway we got a triage going. We went through the items and put each one in one of three places:

1. Trash
2. POD
3. Apartment

It worked well.

The delivery and pickup people showed up on time and got the job done in spite of low hanging wires and snow storms. They were polite and efficient. The POD was clean as a whistle when it arrived… we tried to give it back to them in the same condition. The stuff in the POD arrived intact and undamaged.

The POD was not cheap, so if you have a fixed set of items all ready to go and need to store them, you can probably find cheaper storage. But for what we had to do, the POD worked out well.

We had another blizzard. We got 18″ of snow on the ground in a single day. But this time we did it right. Here is a photo of the Rav during the blizzard.

Which looks pretty good when you consider what it looked like outside the garage door.

Meanwhile, inside the house we were cozy, with smiling, tropical plants watching it snow.

OK. So it took us 2 1/2 hours to dig out. Nothings perfect.

Due to the forces of public interest (people want to know), I got up early this morning and sucked it up and ran an experiment. I turned on all of the lights in the kitchen, which in this new house approaches a small thermonuclear event, and pushed the “brew” button on the coffee pot. Due to the demented nature of the electrical system in that “other” house, I have developed an aversion to brewing under the lights, but I did it anyway to see what would happen in the new house.

Here is the result:

Nothing happened.

Well, that’s not totally true. I did get a nice cup of coffee out of it, but there was no smoke or sparks or sirens… just coffee. So nothing happened, even after I counted to ten (with my eyes closed and my fingers crossed).

We had heating oil delivered to the Fallapartment again because it has been cold, and the place really eats heating oil. Here is the disturbing part…. the bill came to $666.23. Here is something even more disturbing. Back in July, when we moved into the Fallapartment, the bill from the moving company was $666.50. Coincidence? I don’t think so. There is something evil about the place.

We had a fox in the back yard. It looked like he was making a nest behind our leftover patio blocks. I snapped a photo through the kitchen window.

As soon as I snapped the photo, he looked right at me and then moved on. Good hearing.

As the Robert Burns poem To a Mouse says, “The best-laid schemes o’ mice an’ men Gang aft agley,…“. And as it is with mouses, so it is with houses.

One of our garages, which shall forever obviate the need for ice scrapers on cars, was still blocked by the POD when the blizzard hit, leaving us with this:

Oops.

Oh well. The POD is empty, and they are picking it up tomorrow, so this is truly, positively, and verily the last time that this will happen.

Knock wood.

We are back online. This blog was down for a few days because our internet connection was disconnected for the second Big Move. But we are back up again.

We are also back at our old location, but in our new house. It is a wonderful house.

We moved out during a heat wave, so to keep the karma balanced, we moved in during a snow storm.

But, that doesn’t matter because, now we are here, and as a smart man said to me once, “It’s all good”.

Thanks to everyone for all the support you gave us as we went through this transition. We want to wish every one of you a Very Merry Christmas, and a Happy New Year.

P.S. Don’t stop reading the blog yet. There are lots of loose ends to tie up, so there may be some funny stories yet to come.

Our new table and chairs were delivered today. They had to bolt the legs onto the table, so it spent some time on its back on the floor.

But then we noticed that our table is signed on the bottom. You can barely see it in the photo above. Here is a closeup.

The table and chairs are solid cherry wood. The table was made entirely by a single craftsman. It looks like the chairs might have been made by several different craftsmen.

We also received our stools for the peninsula. The stools are solid maple. You can see the table and chairs and stools in the photo below.

The stools were made in Canada. Here is another view.

We chose those chairs because of the lumbar support provided by the recurve in the backs of the chairs. They are really comfortable. That will certainly make it difficult to get up from the table.

The plants are in the house.

Well, not all of the plants are in the house. But some of the plants are in.

The final touches are done on the upper cabinets. A small molding has been added around the bottoms of the upper cabinets to provide cover for the under cabinet lights.

Hey, look! More plants.

Here is a closeup of the molding.

It looks nice. If you look closely, you can see the tendrils of the plant creeping up toward the electric sockets. They are taking over already. Spooky.