Almost There

A lease contract was signed around end of May. Our tenant are moving in this weekend. So, this is the last week we can still enjoy the house, do some final touch up and clean up. Daddy still spent a lot of time there doing this and that. Sometimes, he'd just go there, do some reading, and enjoy a little quiet time. I guess after you devoted all your energy on something for a few months, it must be hard to let go. And there are always last minute things that surface from nowhere. For instance, with the summer coming, daddy found that backyard lawn was turning yellow. So he added a new line of sprinkler heads. The sight of the lawn dug up for a good 50-60 feet, with the PVC pipes laid down in the trenches, seemed to tell the world that this lovely project is still going pretty strong :-). Then last night, we noticed that the cabinet under the kitchen sink showed some dark wet pattern on the inside edge which might be the symptom of a leaky pipe somewhere inside the wall. The plumber was called in to attend to the problem next day. Two weeks ago, daddy did what was promised on his to-do list as the A/C Testing and learned that the central A/C unit was only blowing hot air, so there went another $850. In the past weekend, we were doing serious clean up in the garage. Piles of wood, boards, tiles, paint cans, tools, and extra material were loaded into our 12 year old minivan, then unloaded in our garage. Cleaning up our own garage will be something we will worry about later.

We decided early on that we were not going to sell this house, the first house we bought when both of us were still doing our graduate studies (3 years after Daddy started working full time). This is also the house where both our beloved children were born. I still remember the first day we moved in, when our neighbor Sonia from across the street knocked on our door and gave us a home-baked cake. It was the first time we experienced the American hospitality and we were so touched. The neighbors who lived there when we moved in 24 years ago are still there now. In the past several months they'd come by and chat a bit when they see us there. So, we will temporarily say goodbye to our old house. But we'll be back, when we are too old to climb the stairs in our 2-story house, where both our children grew up from kindergarten to 12th grade.