The Sweet Smell of Citra Avenue

Ready for a looooong post? Good. I know we've drawn this out but between busy work schedules and two new callings (Dana's back in YM with the Deacons and I'm the new Youth Camp Leader, um, Leader for Girl's camp) we've been busy. But here we go:

Saturday February 23rd we left Terrace Heights in our small rental truck (too small? Is three trips too many? Uh...yes!), loaded down with 7 years worth of memories and furniture. Dana's brother, Matt, and his fiancé, Kristin, were kind enough to come do the first two loads. Is it just me or is moving awful? Not just me then. No, really, it was fine. We had great weather for February. The hardest part was when Matt had to leave and I had to wait at the new house for the Internet guy so poor Dana did the last load at the house single handedly. Why didn't we have elders quorum help? Because we are dumb, prideful, 30-somethings who don't know our own limits and refuse to accept the mountains of help that were offered:) Next time elders quorum, you are on notice.

Dana hit his limit when he finally got to the house at 5PM after returning the truck. Whew. We put just the essentials together but basically lived in a land of boxes for a weekend before we just threw our hands up and shoved the unopened boxes into one bedroom and gleefully closed the door. Outta sight, outta mind, right?



Then we collapsed. Er, except not, because of this giant pile of laundry and the seven others like it:) So my wonderful Dana heaved his corpse off the couch, connected the washer and then plugged in the--wait a minute, is that four prong?! Yup. Three prong plug into a four prong outlet doesn't work. I took pity on my sad hubby and ran to Lowe's for an adapter (learning along that way that you don't just 'pop in' to town from Moxee. It's a serious time commitment. We live in the sticks people.)

Long story short: they do not make adapters. I found this out AFTER I got back home with the wrong thing:( We would have laughed, except our muscles hurt. One more looooong trip to Lowe's and a more helpful customer service guy and we were in business. Turns out you can just buy a new cord and rewire the dryer. Voila! Dry clothes! And Dana felt very handy. The day ended with Papa Murphy's pizza, salad, and soda delivered by an extremely nice Relief Society. How did they know we would need it so badly?

One other funny thing: our new house did not come with blinds so a few weeks ago we went to the house and measured and ordered these cute, white, honeycomb blinds. Only when we went to put in the order I couldn't tell if our bedroom measurements were 40 wide or 48 wide (big difference) so we panicked and decided to order those later. Dana put up the other blinds before we moved in, but it meant we spent the first four nights in our new abode sans bedroom blinds. I seriously did not sleep a wink:)

The next week was a welcome to homeownership for us as the disposal randomly stopped working (no cause for alarm, the house has a one year total warranty and it turned out we just needed to learn where the reset button was no so biggie:) On our first full Saturday, after a week of dragging the garage door up and down by hand, we did our first home improvement project and installed a garage door opener. The instructions only had 12 steps but it took us over five hours to get it up--plus or minus an hour to run into town and buy a ladder when we realized not even a seven foot tall giant could drill holes into the ceiling standing on a kitchen chair. Ahhh, funny husband.

Finally, it was up and humming. Dana did all the wiring himself and (when I discovered a happy little spider hanging from the wall) took over the final two steps so I could hurry inside and hide, um, make dinner.

Now we can get in and out of our garage with ease and it's made me appreciate all those little things I grew up with and never realized were blessings. It's also made me appreciate just how handy my smarty-pants hubby really is. He can do anything when he puts his mind to it. Even the dishes! Hint hint.

That's it. We've been here almost a month and already it feels more like a home than anywhere else we've ever lived. And we love it. Lots of room to grow and entertain, plush new carpet, clean, creamy walls, and the scent of new house whenever we walk through the door:) We have a beautiful garage where both our cars can bask in the warmth and coziness. Dana put a shelf up on the far wall last weekend and we have many many plans for improvement. Grass and a sprinkler system will be going in later this month, possibly followed by a fence later in the summer (not that we don't enjoy our back neighbor and her cotton candy pink bathrobe of course). We have a few photos up on the wall and more to come. A big thank you to all our new neighbors who have supplied advice, housewarming gifts, and the occasional cookie. We LOVE being homeowners.