New House Blog: Episode XV - Pauses And Plants And 'Ppliances, oh my!

Hello again.  Can you believe it's Episode XV already?  Before you know it we'll be on Episode XVI.  And then on to XVII.  And so on.  And so forth.  How many Episodes might we have?  How high do Roman Numerals go?

Before we get to house business we want to give some thanks and credit to some people who we have not yet mentioned, without whom we would have had a much more difficult experience so far.  We want to thank the kind and generous workers at Home Depot.  They have been consistently kind, courteous, knowledgeable, and generally helpful.  Regardless of which Home Depot we visit we know we will get good service, and that is something that we genuinely greatly appreciate.  We don't visit OSH nearly as much as Home Depot, but the people there seem to be friendly, too.  We also want to thank Paul, from Sears, for his excellent service today (more about Paul and Sears later).  It's easy to take store workers for granted, and to just expect them to always be there and always be helpful, but we must never forget that they, too, are people, and they deserve our gratitude and thanks.

Pauses

Well, not so much a pauses as a slow-down.  Lately we have not been able to spend as much time at our house as we would like, due to an outside commitment we committed to before we knew we would be working on our house at this time - before we had even started house-hunting.  This outside commitment is something that we both enjoy, but it has taken up some valuable house-prepping time.  Since this is our New House Blog, and not our musical blog, we won't say much about it at this time, but here are a couple of pictures to give you and idea of what it might be, and if you want more detail you can visit www.svct.org.

Plants

Landscaping is not high on our priority list right now, and it will probably remain that way until after we have moved in to our house.  However, we do want to have something growing in the blank area by the sidewalk, so we have scattered both moss rose and poppy seeds in that area, and we are watering it every day in the hopes that something grows.  After three days we don't have any sprouts yet, but we remain optimistic.  Here is what the area looks like right now.  If anything grows we will provide pictures.  If nothing grows we may not ever mention it again. :)

'Ppliances

That's not a real word, is it?  Not officially, no.  It is short for Appliances.  Our house came with only two appliances, two of which were discovered to be defective and/or completely non-functional.  Thus, we had a need to acquire some new appliances.  Using Consumer Reports as our main research vehicle, we decided to visit the local Sears to make our final selections and arrange for delivery.  We were helped by the very friendly Paul.  He helped us find the models and options we were looking for, and we were completely done in about two hours (despite his having to enter the order in the computer twice because of an error).  How many of you can say that you got all of your appliances in two hours (including the microwave).  We expect delivery in a couple of days, with the exceptions of the microwave, which we picked up in-store, and the range, which is expected in July.  Based on what you know of us, can you guess what finish we picked, and what options we opted for?  Here's a hint (not necessarily a helpful hint, though) - all of our appliances are electric.

Looking Forward

By now it's pretty obvious that we are painting at least some of the rooms in our house.  As yet we have not showed much of our painting progress.  This is intentional.  We will be showing you painted rooms as they are completed, and possibly revealing the names of the colors so that you can use these same exact colors on your walls (or floors, or cars, or RV's).

If I only had a
   bIsh