The house needed some color and updating so we spent two weeks painting and changing the floors before moving in.
Emilia got to pick her bedroom's wall color. She chose pink of course. We painted the majority of the house tan, which help showcase some architectural details (such as the molding around the doors, chair railing, fireplace) and warm up the space.
We also replaced all of the carpet (except for the apartment downstairs) with either wood or new carpet. We did a lot of the floor prep ourselves and hired out the installation of the flooring. There was no way we would have been able to do it in a reasonable amount of time or match the quality work of expert installers.
Most nights Todd would get home from work, we would have dinner, head over to the house and work for a couple of hours. Go back to Todd's parents house where we were staying, put the kids to bed and go back out to the house to work on it for a few more hours. Needless to say, by the time the two weeks were up we were both exhausted.
To make things harder, the day we moved into the house it snowed on and off most of the day. The movers we wired to help postponed by an hour hoping the storm would clear. It stopped long enough for them to load and unload our furniture but it started up again once they left.
We still had boxes in storage that Todd, his dad an one of his brothers helped us bring into the house. They had to deal with all of the snow.
This is what our backyard looked like on the day of the move. We hadn't had much snow the previous weeks and after that storm we didn't have any more snow for about a month.
The picture on the other side is of a deer leaving our back yard. Our house is not completely fenced off. The other night as I was sitting in the office I noticed some movement in the front yard out of the corner of my eye. It was dark and not well lit so I wasn't sure what was in our property. I could tell there were several large figures moving along the side fence into the back yard. Then I realized it was deer.
I ran to the back patio to see them but they were all the way against the back fence. It was too dark to take pictures and I didn't want to venture out in the snow with my slippers. I started counting the animal's ears. At first I thought there were only four ears, they two more popped up and then two others. In the end, I was able to recognize four doe and one buck.
We live in the lowest spot in the valley, right at the river bottom so I was surprised to see animals venture out so far from the mountains. I learned from my neighbors that they travel the jogging paths that span for miles along the river and that it's not unusual for them to show up in our neighborhood.
We showed the kids the picture I took of them. Emilia told me it was one of Santa's reindeer visiting Zig-Zag our Elf on the Shelf friend.
