Conspiracies

I mentioned in my return post that life had been conspiring against us, thereby stealing any free time we had available. As promised, I wanted to elaborate on the things that have been keeping us busy for the last several weeks.

1. Illness. I mentioned that I was sick for several days right around Easter, but the following week Chad got sick as well. He'd gone to Salina to hunt turkeys at his parents house on the following Sunday, and after successfully bagging a bird his first evening there, he woke up the next morning with the same sore throat I'd had the week before. He ended up cutting his hunt short and coming home before getting his second bird, and then basically going straight to bed. You might wonder why I would be using Chad's illness as an excuse for not blogging, so let me explain. Chad is generally extraordinarily helpful around the house, so when he was in bed for 5 whole days, that left me to do all the cooking/cleaning/shopping/laundry/dog walking and even MOWING (which I hadn't done in years!) all by myself. This might not sound like a big deal to most people, but it was certainly enough to keep me super busy! Plus, because Chad was going to bed at 8:00 every night trying to get better, I was going to bed super early every night as well, trying just to STAY better. I was so afraid he was going to give my sickness germs right back to me!

The crazy thing about Chad's illness was that while mine cleared up in 3-4 days, his hung on way longer. On day five off work he finally went to the doctor, at which point he was given antibiotics and diagnosed with bronchitis, because the infection had settled into his chest. The doctor prescribed some cough medicine too, which did not help at all, so we both had several sleepness nights where I ended up on the couch because the coughing just wouldn't stop! It was terrible. Although Chad went back to work after the next weekend, he still didn't get his coughing under control for another week, after a second trip to the doctor for more meds. An illness of this magnitude is highly unusal for my hubby, as we could only remember one other time in our 15 year marriage (besides his hospital stay) that he's even taken antibiotics.

So basically, excuse number one was that I had to be the head chef/maid/driver/dogwalker/breadwinner/shopper/landscaper/nurse for an entire two weeks! It made me SO appreciate all that my husband does around the house when he's healthy!

2. House Hunting. Holy moly, I had no idea how much TIME it would take for us to find a new house we liked. I'm mean seriously, I cannot even explain how many hours we've spent sitting at the computer looking at houses online over the course of the last month. Since we realized that houses in the country on adequate acreage that are zoned the way we want them are very few and far between and might take years to find, we started actively looking within the city limits instead. For several weeks, every free evening we had was dedicated to reviewing the listings and discussing the pros/cons and rating them according our "must haves" and putting them into a spreadsheet to help track them (I'm not even kidding) and emailing real estate agents to make appointments and going to those appointments. The weekends were spent going to open house after open house after open house, which was fun yet incredibly time consuming! A couple of weeks ago we finally signed a buyer's agreement with an agent we liked, so now she's doing a lot of the legwork for us, which is incredibly helpful. Last weekend she took us to five or six houses in one afternoon and was slightly annoyed that we weren't really in love with any of them. That's the discouraging part about all of this searching--we've still only found one house that we really felt was a good fit for us without a whole lot of renovation. ONE out of what seems like hundreds! UGH! We haven't made a decision on said house because there are a whole lot of other factors we're still trying to consider, one of them being the fact that we don't know how "sellable" our house will be...which brings me to the next conspiracy.

3. House Primping. Since we are anticipating putting the house on the market as soon as we find a new house (or possibly sooner), we've been doing non-stop home improvement projects around our current house. Nothing really major, mind you, but the last few weekends have involved tons of planting/landscaping, painting a couple of sections outside that only had one coat of paint, staining woodwork, polishing cabinets, spackling/sanding spots on the walls, painting spackled spots (after finding the extremely old paint in the garage that matches and trying to salvage it or going to Home Depot to try and match what we can't find), recaulking sinks, and cleaning things that we don't normally clean very well (like the oven--yuck!). This morning we did the final last minute cleaning before all of that hard work finally paid off, as five real estate agents came for a tour of our house to complete a current market analysis. Thankfully, they all seemed very pleased about the condition and presentation of our house--one agent actually used the word "phenomenal"! They complimented our paint colors and decorating and yard and found only a couple of tiny things that they thought we should do before putting the house up for sale, which made us feel really good! We were so relieved and so excited to have the CMA done with--and so ready for a relaxing evening that didn't involve any work! Tomorrow we should find out the price at which they would suggest listing the house, and then we'll decide if and when to put it on the market. We're a little nervous about doing so before we find a house that we actually want to buy though--I'm scared of it selling and us having to move somewhere that we don't totally love! Moving is such a hassle to me I don't want to do it unless we find that perfect home, which I'm starting to think isn't even out there!

So there are my excuses in a nutshell--wait...what's the opposite of a nutshell?