Closing and the Rest

I left work at 11:00 on Friday and went to meet Z for lunch before closing. We raced over to the attorneys' office for our appointment and spent the next two hours or so signing papers and joking around with the builder, our agent, the seller's agent, and the loan officer. The attorney must have thought we were the craziest bunch of people, because I'm guessing most people take this process more seriously than we were. We were just so relieved, and the builder was such a nice man that we were all having fun. Afterwards, the builder gave us a $50 gift card to Longhorn, our agent gave us a $40 gift card to Home Depot, and the mortgage company gave us a set of cooking utensils with their name on the handles (?). Then we went to the apartment to change clothes and regroup. We headed to the house after that to clean and prepare for painting. We washed all the windows inside and out (nose prints were everywhere!), I sort of cleaned the bathrooms (not the bathtubs yet), stuff like that. Then we headed out to Lowe's to purchase blinds, paint, and a mailbox, as well as the supplies for everything. That took two buggies and a couple of hours, but then we had to decide on our fridge. After driving around to different stores in different cities, we wound up at Lowe's again to order the first one we'd liked. It'll be delivered next Saturday. After that it was getting pretty late, but we went to the house to get ready to paint the next morning. We started taping the baseboards, ceiling, etc., and laying drop cloths. We were there until about 12:30 that night.

Saturday morning came early, but we were meeting my sister at the house to start painting the bedroom a beautiful blue. We all got started around 9:30 or so, and worked nonstop until lunchtime when we took a Zaxby's break. After that, my sister and I finished painting the bedroom while Z hung blinds for the whole house (quite a feat). Then we moved to finish taping up the kitchen. Since we have tray ceilings and a chair railing in the dining room, that's a lot of taping. My sister left around 5:00 or so, and Z and I took a dinner break. We went to the apartment for about an hour to rest and he watched the beginning of the Texas/Texas Tech game before we decided to go back to the house to paint the bottom of the dining room. We'd decided to do a darker green on the bottom and a lighter green on the top as well as the rest of the kitchen. That area was so small we decided to go ahead and knock it out Saturday night. It took about an hour and a half though to paint and clean up from the whole day, so we got home around 9:30 I think. I don't even really remember going to bed.

Sunday morning we got up early for church (8:30 is too early for Sunday School). After church we changed clothes and headed back out to start painting the rest of the kitchen with the lighter green. We knew it was going to be tricky to paint around all those cabinets and in tiny places, so we took our time and were very careful. Z had to leave to go buy a ladder at one point so he could paint above the cabinets. Around 5:30 we had to leave for a while because Z was headed to Huntsville to be in court first thing this morning. So he had to change clothes and get packed, and we were only in one vehicle. Around 6:30 he left and I went back to the house to finish the kitchen. I am a scaredy-cat though, and I was having a hard time staying there by myself in the dark, especially after one of the neighbors rang the doorbell and scared me half to death. I kept my sister on the phone with me while I wasn't painting so I'd have someone to talk to. I finally wound up leaving around 8:30 once I was done because I was so tired and creeped out.

Tonight after work we went over to the house to remove the tape from the kitchen and clean up our painting mess. We brought 4 or 5 boxes to the house and swept in the kitchen, but we were too tired to do anything else. Also, during this time we've been totally neglecting the apartment, so I really needed to do some laundry tonight.