A rest day

I have declared today a rest day. I’m going to sit and blog, and order a refrigerator, and stream music. Because I now have internet! The internet guy arrived at 7 AM this morning. And I’m tired. And I’ve been traveling, and in between traveling I’ve been moving.

And in between traveling and moving, I’ve been trying to get one of our rentals rented. The tenants left at the end of April, but I didn’t advertise it at the end of April, because I was in Boston for a week. Then I didn’t advertise it at the beginning of this month because I was in California for a week. Finally, as we drove across the desert on our way home, I put up the ad and started fielding inquires.

As I started scheduling rental showings our way back from California I realized that I was going to need to spend all week in Albuquerque showing the rental. And John works in Albuquerque. So it made a lot more sense to be in Albuquerque than in Santa Fe. And guess what, we have a house in Albuquerque! Only problem – it was completely empty. We closed on our new house purchase back in April, but we haven’t had any time to get moved in. No furniture, no refrigerator, not much of anything.

We had toilet paper at the new house, and we had luggage with us from our trip to California. I found a blow-up mattress in our Albuquerque storage unit. So that first night we stopped up in Santa Fe to snag sheets, blankets, a few more clothes, and a couple of towels. Wa-la, moved in!

After a few days of camping in our new house with the barest of necessities, John took Friday off and we were able get an old refrigerator out of our storage unit in Bernalillo. I don’t even know which house it came from or why we didn’t get rid of it at the time.

John and I loaded it into our pickup truck (we’re so happy to finally have a pickup truck, we use it all the time). We were in two vehicles, ferrying stuff down from Santa Fe, so he drove the pickup out to the Placitas house to do some watering since we were already up in Bernalillo. I had a migraine so I opted to drive straight home to our new house, hoping I could get a quick nap in before needing to get back to work. When John got home, he didn’t want to bother me while I was resting, and decided he could unload the refrigerator by himself.

And he dropped the refrigerator on the Mini Cooper!

He felt bad about it, but I just felt guilty for taking a break when I should have been helping. The fridge was fine, and the Mini is scratched a little. That’s the second car damage we’ve suffered during this move (we also dented the 4Runner trying to back the boat around a curve into an impossibly tight parking spot at the new house.)

The old white refrigerator from the storage unit is too large to fit in my new kitchen, but seems to run fine. I’m very happy to have a working refrigerator in the garage. I would typically have considered it a major nuisance to have my refrigerator in the garage instead of the kitchen, but it is far better than not having a refrigerator at all.

On Saturday I was finally done getting the rental fixed up, showing it to prospective tenants, and sifting through applications. Whew. The new tenant is very excited about the house and I think she’ll work out well. The rental is going to end up being empty for an entire month, and I try to get them turned around faster than that, but it is what it is. She sounds like she’ll stay awhile, which will be nice.

Also on Saturday John got the doggie door installed at the new house. It was a challenging installation – it ended up in a closet, lol. There were stud issues where we had initially hoped to put it to the right of the closet. I’m not sure whether we’re just going to remove the closet doors or what. We’ll figure it out I guess. This is the middle bedroom that’s going to be sort of a man-cave hang-out space. Someday I’d like to replace that window with a door to the side yard – it’s a big side yard and I want to make good use of it.

The doggie door also ended up several inches off the floor due to grade differences in our yard, so John’s going to add an interior step.

We had new fencing and lawn installed, so the side yard is fully functioning as safe dog space. The new grass is currently looking very stressed, but the weather has recently cooled off considerably, so maybe the grass will rebound.

You’re going to laugh – I ordered this for Kai.

It’s a fake fire hydrant for boy dogs to pee on! Totally unnecessary of course, but we thought it was cute. And I get annoyed when Kai goes up against my plant pots or the legs of my outdoor furniture and gets pee all over my patio. This is going right in the middle of the new lawn! He will love it.

On Sunday we unloaded our first pod. The first pod contained all the garage, cabinet and closet items from the house in Placitas. All the junk, but none of the furniture and decor.

There’s no furniture because we left the furniture in Placitas to stage the house.

So mostly what I have in my new house right now is John’s random stuff. Some of which seems useful to me, and some of it not so much 😉

We now have an empty pod in Santa Fe, ready for us to fill up with all my stuff, but we haven’t had time to pack and load in Santa Fe yet. I plan to go up there tomorrow and try to get a bit organized.

Mostly what I’ve been doing is scheduling – lots and lots of showings at the empty rental, fencing at the new house, sod at the new house, weed control at a rental, pest control, a broken window replaced at a rental, tile work at a different rental, getting bids for a roof replacement at the third rental, solar tubes at the new house, pod deliveries, refrigerator delivery, the internet guy too early on a Monday morning…it’s my new exciting career in logistics.