Destruction, Reconstruction and Choices

Nine-hundred miles from my present location, in Bellevue, Iowa a tribe of Sieverdings and their accessories are:
1) digging up the yard to install a cut-off in the sewer line. We all fervently hope they can do so without ripping up the street;
2) trying to estimate costs for ripping out and replacing all electrical wiring without a) knowing where all the new appliances will go, or b) having access to the ceiling and walls, while;
3) ripping out acoustical tile drop ceiling in the kitchen and other spaces while;
4) gutting the upstairs kitchen and alchemizing it into an upstairs spa bathroom.
5) conspiring against the one decent first floor closest, located in the guestroom but about to be appropriated into the bathroom.
And that's just this week. Meanwhile, Ron and I are online shopping for fridge, wall oven, gas cooktop, countertops, tin ceilings, flooring, lighting, and that's just next week.
And oh, packing and boxing and garage sale marking, grading papers, serving on boards, doing design work, walking the dog, falling asleep in front of the TV. Imagine the difference six weeks is going to make!

Reunited, and it feels so good

Ron took a step almost as momentous as Neil Armstrong's stroll across the moon: he walked up the interior staircase of the house from botton to top floor, and back again. He's the first person to complete this feat for around 35 years, when the stairway was walled in to create two apartments. He's been at Hotel Setzepfandt for almost a week, shop-vaccing spiders and stairways and garage ceilings. He and Bellevue-ite Al Theilen have the basement and the rafters in one of the garages emptied of junk. Lots of strolling spectators have popped in to take a look at the progress. Steve Roling across the street recognized a huge mirror stored in the garage as belonging to his nephew. Said nephew came over and carried the mirror off, saying that somebody (I'm not sure who) has been storing that mirror for him these many years. I think we need to take an ad in the BH-L alerting the town that any property they've stored at 609 N. Second is in danger of being land-filled. =D
Today Ron is having a strategy meeting with various Sieverdings and Keifers to develop a timeline and get things moving! Anybody have any tips for getting the bats out of our belfry?

Another domino falls

Because we're not part of the five percent of Americans who have 95 percent of the wealth, Ron & I cannot own two homes at a time indefinitely. So it was with some trauma we placed our Laramie home on the market, on Friday, March 25. Soothing the trauma somewhat is the fact that on Monday, March 28, the house went under contract at the full asking price. The first several hours after a man pounded the For Sale in our yard, we were both hesitant to go out and see how it looked from the street. We peered at it from a front window, from which we could only see a sliver of the sign. A few hours later I forced myself to go take a look. No matter how much one welcomes change, when that change moves from a gleam in your eye to something that crawls and then something that can walk on its own, it is a shock. Fortunately we didn't have to endure anxiety of the unknown for long. A young couple from Seattle, both incoming UW faculty members, seemed to fall in love with it right away. Welcome to the Pink House, Annika and Bailey. It'll be yours around the first of June.