Howdy from Alabama!
Our trip from Utah went relatively smoothly. We packed the as with as many plants as we could and headed out about 3 weeks ago:
The car fuel line got plugged up in the middle of Nebraska, but cleared up after some slow driving:
After 3 days of driving, we arrived and closed on the new house, blew up an inflatable mattress, then crashed:
We spent 5 days sitting on pillows:
The kitchen counter made for a great standing desk:
The empty living room would have made for a great blimp hanger:
Doggy spent a lot of time watching/smelling the backyard forest from the deck:
Our stuff arrived without too much trauma … only 4 things broke. That storage room in the back was stuffed full of packing paper:
The piano was the biggest challenge, but they got it done without loss of life or limb:
I’ve re-worked a bunch of lighting, adding and switching to brighter LED lighting:
The ladder has been touring the house. We setup our computers where the dinning table usually goes:
The spot lights and multi-colored ‘water light’ projector we brought from Utah work great on the wall where the 20′ pipe organ pipes used to be:
One of my IBM co-workers sent me a link from a Wall Street Journal article he recently read that talked about the original owner of our house. Dr. Blackstone had built this house in the ’70s around an impressive 68 rank, 4 console pipe organ.
They packed it up when they moved from Birmingham to Ohio 18 years ago to head a cardiac research group at the Cleveland Clinic. Only just recently have they finished a new house on Lake Erie, again built specifically for the the pipe organ … actually this time they have TWO pipe organs! You can see pictures of our house back when it had the organ, as well as pictures of their impressive new house here:
Our house is really well built (e.g. wood encased steel beams), but the crawl space was a mess. I cleaned it up, excavating many buckets of dirt and bags full of other garbage. The downstairs air unit was original, so I had that replaced. This is the old one:
We were a little worried after the previous owner told us he had never opened the windows, but we discovered, after some jiggling, they still work fine:
The creek in the backyard normally flows with just a trickle, but last week, for about an hour, it gushed with water … under clear blue skies. Still haven’t figured out how that happened:
Boris and Irena just finished a 4 day visit with us:
We succeeded in our goal of finding them a home they both liked, not too far from ours (9 minutes):
Unlike the home they renovated in Utah, this one is in great shape already, and the backyard is lovely:
They have a fun porch to the backyard from their bedroom:
They will close in November and likely move in December.
Last picture is from some sort of Alabama Yeti Monster we found lounging in our kitchen:
Bruce
