The winter of discontent

Ok - so that title is a bit dramatic, but it kind of sums up how my winter felt!

It was dark, cold, snowy and icy and I didn't do much at the barn because I just didn't feel like standing around in the dark after work.  It was also like a skating rink around the barn, so it wasn't really even possible to do some ground work!

I was also really busy with the whole house thing. We decided in February that we wanted to put in an offer on the new house, conditional on us selling our house in town.  The offer was accepted by the sellers and we had 10 days to get our house on the market.

In 10 days, we had the floors refinshed, had 2 carpets replaced, had an electrician fix some wiring issues and we decluttered and re-organized most of the house. It was exhausting but we got it all done.

Richard cleaning the kitchen - with two helpers looking on...

Meanwhile, I tackled the basement.  This is a "during" shot, when I had pulled everything out...No after shot, sorry.  Needless to say, I took everything out of there, crammed it in boxes and stored it in our garden shed!

The living room after decluttering and refinishing the floors - I'm pretty happy with it...

This shelf was covered in the hubby's bike gear before, but the cats liked it after I cleaned it.  Roxie is curled up here

And Charlie resting in the same spot! I guess they liked being tucked in with the books?

We were told by lots of people that our house would sell quickly, don't worry!  But I worried and I waited. We packed up the cats and dog for viewings and open houses a few times per week and one day the two cats figured out how to get out of their carrier!  Luckily we were in a parking lot and not driving, because they were crawling all over the car.  The big cat just sat in his carrier patiently waiting to go home...  :-)

Freedom!  Well...sort of, but not really...

So we waited some more. I was beginning to get discouraged, thinking that we would be stuck in that house forever. Dramatic, I know, but that is how it felt at the time!  We had to drop our price a bit and still the results were the same!  We sent the dog back to my father-in-law in late March (we just had her for the winter) and I found it much less difficult to keep the house clean without the dog hair everywhere. The cats are much less messy!

We finally had an offer on the house in early April, but it still wasn't a done deal. We had a few minor house inspection issues to deal with on our end, but we were able to work everything out.  It was a long, stressful process, but it was worth it in the end!

I'm starting to get excited now, because we move in 6 weeks!  I have a new list going on my whiteboard and I have started doing a bit of packing and re-organizing. I am actually unpacking everything I did to de-clutter the house for sale and re-organzing it because it was all mixed up and I didn't label any of the boxes!

I'm hoping to reduce the amount of "stuff" that we have by a fair bit.  I have the time to do this before moving, so I'm going to take advantage of that. I already have a pile of stuff to donate and I think we will take some stuff to a community yard sale later in the spring!

I probably won't be moving Dolly home (wow - how cool is it to type that!) until July 1 - I want to get my hay sourced and in the barn and make sure the fences are in good shape first.  I also need to sort out whether I'm going to get a companion for her or try her alone...