Moved!

Well, the big day finally arrived. Last week, a team of movers swooped into our temporary apartment, filling it with loud joking, laughter, and the unceasing sound of tape being torn off huge rolls, and within just a couple of hours, emptying it into their trucks for the drive north to the new house.

Everything was going well and by our third evening in the house, we were looking around and thinking we were pretty darned lucky. Boxes were getting unpacked, the living room was starting to take shape, and everything was quiet.

And then the house flooded.

I was walking past the master bathroom water closet when I heard gurgling coming from the toilet. I stepped in there to take a look and saw large air bubbles rising to the surface of the water. I waited for them to stop, and then flushed, thinking that would clear the drain. The toilet flooded. I scrambled for the plunger and stood plunging for nearly five minutes before DH took over the task. Another fifteen minutes of his efforts still yielded no clear toilet bowl, so I asked him if he thought it might help for me to flush one of the other toilets in the house.

"Can't hurt," was his response. Guess what? It can hurt, and did, though neither of us could possibly know that at the time. I flushed the toilet in the powder room and it immediately flooded, too. When I went back into the master bathroom to tell him, we realized that both the shower and the bathtub were also filling with water. Before we could even really wonder about it, the water, brown and smelly and gross gross gross, started pouring out of the shower. Pouring. It kept pouring for another twenty minutes or so, until that half of the house was filled with yuckiness.

The next morning, the builder came and assessed the damage.

The damage to the floors was almost total, and everything has to be replaced.

The hardwoods... 

The carpets...

The trim and base moldings...

All of it. For the last week and a half, we've been living in a construction zone, complete with dust, contractors, and noise. By the middle of next week, most of the floors will be replaced, this time with hardwood throughout. The bedroom is the only room retaining its carpet, and that's only if we can get the manufacturer to send it to us (an iffy proposition, at the moment.)

The builder is doing all the work and eating all the costs, including replacing all the towels we threw down to sop up the mess, as well as the four new bathmats that got destroyed. My patience is thinning, but hopefully soon my home will be returned to normal.

And as always, there is some good news to throw into the mix.

The new faucet was installed and it's fab!

Gorgeous, right?

Also, work on the studio is plowing right along. My private contractor has become my new hero, pushing his crews to seal the floor, install lighting, AC/heat, and a new door, and plumbing this beauty...

 

 ... a three-basin, two-faucet restaurant sink, kindly donated by my daughter's in-laws and delivered by my kiddo and her SO. Thanks, guys, I love you!

Last week, the garage looked like this:

And last night, after a huge effort by my DH and myself, it looked like this:

There's still a lot of unpacking to do, and then new cabinetry has to be installed to hold all of my art supplies. And it all has to be done quickly because I have a major deadline approaching... (drum roll, please!)

This year, I've been invited back to the IQF in Houston to demo my work! I will be doing two sessions, one on GelliPlate printing on Friday, November 2nd, between 10am and noon, and one on cut Stacked Journaling, on Sunday, November 4th, between 12pm and 2pm. I hope to see all of you out there; it's a total hoot to meet artists I've only come to know online.

As soon as my studio is up and running, I'll be making art like crazy, so watch for photos of it to appear here, soon.

In the meantime, happy creating!