House Stuff

I'm interrupting the recounting of the trip to tell you that we closed on our house this morning. I was prepared for a much larger stack of papers from what people were telling me but it wasn't that bad.

We hauled some boxes up there in order to try to pare down our moving costs and brought up some cleaning things. The sellers left us a bottle of wine and a good luck note, we met them last night and they were very nice. The man was so proud of all his craftsmanship, the woman had to remind him that we already bought the place and he didn't need to keep trying to sell us on it.

We took pics of the place totally empty, brouht in our boxes and made a list of things (already) to get from Home Depot. We decided to replace the locks, we got a darker knob than they had. All of their fixtures, handles, knobs etc are gold so those are going to slowly be going. Of course, as I was taking inventory on exactly how many of these things we need to get, I also counted that for each door there were 3 hinges that would be required, because of course, those are all gold as well. So needless to say, this will be a slow process....

We also noticed that as we put on the new locks the knobs are just a smidge smaller, small enough to see that the sellers hadn't taken off the hardware when they painted and now there is a ring of white around the front door (it's painted blue) where the old knob outline used to be. We are going to try to find something that comes close enough for now, eventually we'll repaint the door since it's peeling in some areas and get new shutters. They have a medium blue up there now, it's not something I would have chosen...

We had our first visitors. Two gentlemen named Marco and Frencesco (9 and 8 respectively) who incessantly rang our doorbell. When I answered they asked where our children were and could they come out to play. They were crestfallen when I told them it was just me and M but stayed long enough to tell me that when we do have kids they should be careful playing in the streets because they aren't as safe as they used to be, that Marco used to have a parrot named Cuchi Cuchi who was naughty and his mom gave it up for adoption but then felt bad and got it back...there was something else but I forget...