Here there be dragons...

"I'm telling you stories. Trust me." - Winterson

The moving games continue

So we've been "small towned" (yes it's a verb) a few times since being here...   For instance, Chris and I tried a local pub today and when we sat down on the patio, the waitress came right away to ask what we wanted...   "Well, what do you have?"  "Oh!  Would you like a menu?"  lol.  Suffice to say, nobody else on the patio needed a menu, and most were being addressed by name.   Chris also got it in the convenience store the other day -- "I haven't seen you before, did you just move in?" lol.  I haven't been in there yet. We'll see...

The "downtown" is very cute.  Tiny, but picturesque.

You may remember from a previous post that we had to pull up the weed-infused carpet and attempt to get hardwood down.  Chris managed to get the master done (or done enough -- we still don't have the floor vents) so that we could set up a bed when we moved in.   This was an entirely new experience.  Why?  Well because we went with an Endy mattress.   

For those not in the loop - this comes rolled up in a box, weighing less than 100 lbs.  


It comes with these instructions



So we unroll...


It made a hissing sound as we opened the package...


And in less time than you'd expect, we had an actual mattress. 

As to the mattress itself?  Plus side - it's super non-motion sensitive.  Remember those bowling ball mattress commercials?  Way better than that.  I'm pretty sure Bailey could be having zoomies tearing around the bed and you wouldn't feel a thing sitting on the other side.   Down side - it's quite firm.  I think C likes it, but I find it too hard, esp when sleeping on my side.  Suspect all it needs is a pillow top though and then it'd be excellent.   It's also not nearly as thick as previous mattresses.  That's neither plus nor minus (well - for Tucker it's a huge plus), just a random fact.

So good to go right?  We have a floor and a mattress, what more do we need?   Wait - did you see those windows???  And did I mention, we live at the end of the street?

Notice the streetlight?  Yeah - shines right in our window...

So not only is there a streetlight right outside, but every car coming toward us lights up the room, AND if we have lights on, we give a show to anybody on the street.  Less good.   But for reasons I don't entirely understand, even Ikea was sold out of curtain rods?!?!   And Amazon was going to be a couple days.  *sigh*.  So what did we have?

Flooring boxes for the win!

lol it's the opposite of classy (or classy with a capital K), but it was surprisingly effective.

Fast-forward a couple days for blackout curtains and finally a good-night's sleep!

All the rest of our furniture is currently in one room until the flooring is done, making unpacking reasonably impossible...  But we'll get there.  C has been flooring on super-speed -- has both our offices as done as possible so far.  Would be helpful if the pieces we're waiting for would actually come in ;)   Meanwhile I've been unpacking the rest of the house -- trying to make the bathrooms and the kitchen usable...

Other randomness -- Amazon takes much longer to get here :(   BUT, our internet is awesome?!?!  ðŸ˜‚  I guess you need something to do when you live in the middle of nowhere.   I've also had to wait for a ship passing by for the first time now.  I will admit they're quite impressive.


Our slightly evil unicorn...

So it's possible our unicorn has a slightly evil side. 


Yeah, just like that...

Let's see...  Where last we left it, we had purchased new hardwood flooring for the upstairs since the carpet is thoroughly weed-soaked and the oder...  Well rather overwhelming.

Well after purchasing, step one is to get said hardwood to the house.  Rented a U-haul for that adventure.  Driving was less than fun -- I hate not being able to see out the side, and while the double-mirrors did help to ensure there was nobody in my blindspot, it made it impossible to tell how close somebody really was (top mirror showed them way too close and bottom mirror showed them way too far away), which made me really glad I wasn't driving during rush hour cause I basically waited till there were no cars before changing lanes.  Not such an option most of the time.

Our new floor!

Ah well, suffice to say I got to the store, and the hardwood was loaded quickly thanks to a forklift.  Awesome.  Get to the house and time to unload...  The only issue?  I can *barely* lift one box.   We have 43 boxes.  Frig.  So I managed to get three boxes upstairs before my body told me I would very strongly regret trying to move another one.  My solution was going to be to open the boxes and carry portions at a time.  Chris' solution was that he would carry all the boxes.  And he was being successful, so I switched to carrying moving boxes, and when those were finished, carrying carpet and sub-carpet out of the house while he was carrying boxes in.  Every once in a while my muscles would feel okay so I'd try another box.  End total?  I think I moved all of 6 and C moved all the rest.

So much for move in ready

But the carpet was out and the hardwood in.  Win.  Repurposed the U-haul to get the carpet to the dump and good to go.  Then we had a few days of pulling up tacks and staples and other fun stuff.   Today we primed the floor to try to make sure the smell is cancelled permanently.   Which, hopefully will be effective, but really?  Painting the floor that you're going to cover forever?   I really wish I could think of something brilliant to write for whoever one day pulls up the hardwood ;)   Alas, my genius has been exhausted by the degree of BS required for term papers.

Painting the room before putting hardwood on top
is a very evil-unicorn thing to require.

So tomorrow the frantic installation of hardwood begins in a desperate hope to have somewhere to put furniture when the movers come on Tuesday.  Wish us luck!

Our super-fancy dinner.  
I was pretty proud of the pillow seats ;)

But... Water is always south. Isn't it?

There are lots of animals that learn at a very young age how to find food; today I learned tech can too 😂 

So I had Mum's car at the new house (like really new, we've owned it since lunch time).   Mum's car rather than mine because it has significantly more space in it for the transporting of stuff.  All good except I know neither the car, nor the location, and being not my car it is, reasonably, not stocked with my stuff.

Now when I got to the house it said I had about 50km of gas left...  Which means not enough to get home. But that's okay - lots of gas between here and there; C and I were even at a gas station not far away when we were looking at houses.

Spend the afternoon cleaning, cause the house is a disaster.  I don't get how they managed to get it SO bad in only a year.  And am moderately amused that apparently there was one roommate not like the others -- the room that will be my office is the only room in the house w a lock on the door AND also the only room that's clean and smoke-free.  But the rest of the house.  Ugh.

And - my phone was quickly draining battery, both cause I was using it to play music and cause it was searching for cell signal all day.   Nbd - I'd brought charge cable.  Plug in and continue working away.

Time to go home.  Phone is essentially dead.  Hmmm less than good.  Turns out the plug wasn't working.  For move-in ready, this house is requiring an awful lot of work :(    C went down and did some magic in the basement and the plug started again.  Alas, too late for my poor phone.

Get in car and of course none of my chargers are with me.  However, Mum had a few!  Win :)   Except that when I plugged in, all it did was connect me to the car, not actually feed my phone any power :(   Fail.  And somehow the car is now down to 40km left?  ðŸ¤·‍♀️   

So C's directions on how to get to gas "take either the first or the second road and it's down there."   Uh right.  That's sure to end well 😂   The first was a piddly little street so I took the second.  I realized pretty quickly it wasn't the right one, but seemed to be a grid-type setup, so figured I'd be able to loop back at top.  Alas, that was incorrect.  I *did*, however, find myself at the highway so I figured I'd hop on and there would be gas somewhere along the way...   But, uh, north or south?  None of the signs had locations listed.  Fail.  Well we turned away from the water so therefore new town is north of the highway I want to end up on, so let's head south...

Yup, realized pretty quickly that was wrong too.   Fail.   Also, maybe I should look up my new home on an actual map 😂   Since I clearly have no idea where it actually is.  My whole life the water has been south, but occurs to me out there it's actually north.  Damn Golden Horseshoe.  And that just might be too much for my little brain.   So now I'm on a road that I can't just pull over to the side to ask my rapidly-dying phone for help.  And I'm down to 30kms left of gas.  hmmmm.

For those not from around here, I've always lived on top of the water ;) Even when not in Ontario.  
Suffice to say, new house is below the water...

And then the nav/entertainment system goes black.  White words flash up: "You're almost out of gas!"   Well gee thanks Car.  Super-helpful.   The loud ding and big orange gas light on the dash also told me that.  I get that you're hungry, but I'm working on it.

But then...  Then Car's self-preservation kicked in.  "Would you like directions to a near-by gas station?"

Why yes, yes I would. 

She offered me several options and I went w the closest brand I recognized 😂    The trip there took me through a tunnel under the canal, which was somewhat fascinating in that it was torrential rain out, so coming out of the tunnel it looked like cars were being swallowed by a wall of white.   But other than that, Car quickly and accurately led me to gas.   Win.

And since my phone was dying, I took the time to program home into Car as well, and let her figure out how to get me back to the highway (over a bridge this time) and pointed the right direction 😂.  That's usually either Alexa or Siri's job (depending whether I want Spanish and reliable or English and dodgy) but both were on time-out due to dying phone...

So Car for the win today.  That is definitely the best random use of technology I've seen lately.  My car certainly doesn't offer that ;-P   And yes, she even got me home correctly.


Just one more thing...

So today was a Day.  Aren't they all? you may ask...  No, you see everyday is a day.  This was a Day, with a capital D.   It's an entirely different beast.

I woke up stupidly early, which I bitterly resent, especially on the weekend.  lol but the end result is that I got some work done on my paper and went for a walk all before I'd planned to get up.  We had planned for our house walkthrough at 10:45 this morning.   This is the "right before closing, check all the things work" walkthrough.   Now we've moved a few too many times over the last few years so we're used to these.   Walk around, check the water and appliances work, etc.

Driving out, all good.  Chris points out the craziness at the Home Depot - people lined up around the building.  So glad we didn't have to go to a store today.  Ontario just started reopening yesterday; it's the first time in ages stores have been an option and they're at limited capacity.

So when we got there, it wasn't a promising beginning with doggy bags left next to the front porch *sigh* - esp questionable as it seems they didn't actually have pets.  But okay.  Go in and there's a slight oder.  hmmmm.  And otherwise things are pretty dirty - for a house that's only a year old, the previous inhabitants managed to make a good mess of it.  

But sobeit, we start walking through and things are working.  The dishwasher was a bit of a mystery, but we got it working.  Chris saw the neighbour kid out mowing his lawn, and went and offered him $40 to do ours too ;)  Win.  Neighbour kid's mum was thrilled with the whole situation.  So not a bad start.

Then we ventured upstairs.  *sigh*   Remember that faint oder when we first entered?  Well from the best we can tell, there was a substantial amount of marijuana being smoked in the house *sigh*.  And on top of it, not only left-over smoke oder, but also multiple burns in the carpet and we're reasonably certain someone dumped their bong water on the landing.   So awesome.

Now "hardwood floor upstairs" was on our list of things to do some day, but super low on the priority list. Like maybe end of the decade?   What we had thought just required a carpet clean was going to be a much bigger challenge.

Fortunately the two rooms we were planning to use as offices were unburned.  The worst was in the master bedroom.  So we'd pretty much decided we'd apply the ostrich method (as in head-in-the-sand), and use an area rug to cover the worst of it and ignore it till future us could afford to deal with it.   When our amazing realtor volunteered to pay for the hardwood?!?!  She threw out a number and... wow.   So while on a quick google of costs I didn't think it'd cover it, it'd certainly do at least 50% if we were careful with what we picked.

Alright, so off to Home Depot...  Right - remember that comment about not needing to go to a store?  Much less Home Depot?   Right.  Hindsight's an ass.   We get to the closest Home Depot and the line up is insane *sigh*.   Okay, figure we'll go home and hit up another one after dinner when hopefully most people will have gone home.  But on the way home, we'd stop at a few flooring stores on the way.   Well the first one said they had no stock of anything and were booking six weeks out at best.  Not helpful.

Continue our trek and the next one was accidental -- we found it while on the way to a third one.  And it had a few options of hardwood that was not only in stock, but end of the line, so significantly reduced price.  Like 65% reduced.  Which brought it into the range our realtor had offered.  Amazing!   The only one we loved though, they didn't have enough left.  Sad :(

So we continued our journey.  The store C had been targeting was...  less successful.  Sales people were seriously meh and they didn't have anything we particularly liked and nothing in a price range we could possibly make happen.   Alright...  Continue on our way and hit up a Lowes that had essentially no line to get in, but all their product was both more expensive and not as nice as what the previous store had.  

We debated briefly and decided it was silly to pass on a good thing, so went back and ordered the hardwood.  So exciting news - we'll have new hardwood.  Less exciting - it can't be picked up till next week :(   Booo.   But we'll figure it out.

So okay - but if we're putting down hardwood, we need various other things to go with it.  Which means that Home Depot run still needs to happen.   We decided to save that for after dinner, and that ended up being a win.  We were able to go in with no line and collect the various things that had been on the list.  So that's all good.

But suffice to say the afternoon of paper-writing that was the original plan, most definitely did not happen.

All first world problems for sure, but just always that One. More. Thing.