Saturday, April 7, 2012

A Touch Of Primer, A Ton Of Boxes, And A Taste Of Mexico

We're getting our house back into better shape, one step at a time. Fortunately, we don't have to do most of the work ourselves. I say fortunately, not because we're lazy, but because we're none too handy when it comes to do-it-yourself projects. So we found a guy who can do practically anything we need him to do, and he's been doing it all week -- exceptionally well, I might add.

First, he fixed a couple of places in our ceiling where we had some water damage from a previous roof leak. Looks good as new now, almost as though we'd never had a problem. Then he stripped the hideous wallpaper from our bathrooms and shower area, and primed them to be painted next week. He then installed new bi-fold doors for two of our bathroom closets that had no doors at all. Next week, he's painting the bathrooms upstairs, stripping the kitchen and downstairs bathroom of their hideous wallpapers and painting both, and putting in new laminate floors for the kitchen and downstairs bathroom. As for us, we're painting the downstairs, up the stairwell, and the upstairs hallway.

Today, while he was doing his thing on the second floor, we were up on the third floor with one major, overwhelming task as our focus: decluttering, decluttering, decluttering!!! In preparation for that, I went to two different ABC stores and two strip malls this morning, collecting empty boxes to pack our keepable junk and haul it off to the storage unit. Trash bags would handle all the stuff that didn't make the cut for the keep pile. Several hours later, we'd filled up most of the boxes I brought home, and now you can actually see more floor than junk. We're probably two-thirds of the way to being done -- and that was the worst area in the house for accumulated stuff!

It was a long day, but a very productive one. Maybe that's because it started off with a bang. Our super-handy contractor/repair guy told us yesterday that his wife makes and sells authentic Mexican tamales to a store near their house. Having made four separate missions trips to Mexico ourselves, and loving every minute of it (especially the food!), we practically begged him to bring us some tamales the next time she made a batch (no matter what they cost!). As it turns out, that next batch was this morning. He brought us six (still hot!) tamales -- two with chicken, two with chicken and red sauce, and two with peppers, onions, and cheese! They were UH-MAZING! It was just like being back in Mexico again. It made us miss Mexico so much! We tried to pay him for them, but he refused to accept any payment. He just said that if we liked them, maybe we'd order them again sometime. We told him that it was not a matter of "if" we'd order more, but when. Tamale party, anyone? She also makes something called a torta loca, which is like two different meats, beans, cheese, and what not all baked into one huge pie -- think a Mexican version of a pot pie, or something like it. Yeah, we'd eat that, too!

So now that I've made you hungry, I'll call it a night. Oh yeah, and to anyone out there who wants to buy our house, it'll be on the market at the end of the month. Good as new!

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