so mom and dad decided to "toar" the east coast, with an eighty-eight-hour layover in virginia... yea on that! they arrived around 9 on wednesday, walked in the door, and wanted to know where to start. well, with dinner. then what?
ryan and i were ready. we had a list of maybe 12 doable items and 12 thinking items...and as a team of four, we addressed them all (even if it was to just decide we should do that when it wasn't raining).
26 boxes of books were unpacked, and alphabetized onto the shelves which, though in boxes when i left for work on thursday morning, were assembled by the time i returned at lunchtime. (books were post-lunch), the living room became more of a living room with furniture accordingly arranged. mom and i chose paint colors for the downstairs bed and bath rooms (and painted ceiling and walls) while dad and ryan disassembled the mysterious aluminum shed under the deck (mysterious in that we didn't know how many species of spiders lived in there). we did a little wall demolition work in the bathroom ...exposing a column --which is now the architectural feature. yeah, that's it. the change really opens up the corridor of a bathroom that it was, though.
everyone was everywhere....the obselete satellite dish was removed from its concrete roots, it's "decorative fencing" went to the curb, trees were cut down, others were trimmed, exterior lighting replaced, the kiln was (finally) unpacked, holes patched in walls, pictures hung, and the remaining hardware was installed. while we did all this we had the ducts cleaned! amazing! and the interior spider problem has been essentially eliminated! hooray!
we played, too...mom and i spent a couple hours at the chantilly book sale (there was about 12" of extra space on the shelves...i felt the need to fill them), we went out to dinner with the fraedrichs and their delightfully hilarious children, out to lunch at the diner, and for amazing thai food at ryan's and my favorite new comfort food place. we went to church, too, and scoped out the potential community there. mom went walking, dad went swimming, and i visited the gym. we were all quite responsible the whole time!
we knew we had succeeded when the trash pile was the biggest we had ever seen it (even after the entertainment center) when mom and dad left on sunday at 1pm...talk about a marathon weekend of productivity!! YEA!
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