The Good, the Bad, the Smelly

I keep waking up completely disoriented; it’s hard to wrap my head around the glorious fact that all I have to do now is UNpack, not repack our bags and relocate one…two…three more times tomorrow. There is stuff everywhere, but it’s OUR stuff—the stuff we picked up all over the world dreaming of the day we could hang it on our own house walls. I change Isaac’s diapers on a changing table and he naps in his very own nursery. We welcomed our first house guests, our Buddy Bayers, as they pass through on their cross-country move. We caught up with old friends and made new ones around our new dining table last night. Ah…it is GOOD to have a home!

So about that home….


We worked hard toward the fun goal of having the guest room and dining room serviceable in record time. But 36 hours after closing, our new table showed up with TWO table legs completely cracked in half. “Oh sorry, we’ll bring a new one…next week…and we forgot your mattress pad that you need for the warranty…ok if you need it sooner we can just bring out new table legs but they won’t match…ok yes they will but we won’t deliver them until two hours before your friends come…and we will still forget the protective bags for the table leaves…is that a chunk missing from your brand new footboard?”

Our storage shipment containing our washer and dryer is MIA.

The drywall guy did a much better repair job on the bashed in drywall patch the second time.


And as we got ready for bed before our friends’ early-morning departure what should make an appearance in all bathtubs but several days’ sewage! No, the after-hours plumber will not answer his phone at 11:45pm and Chris will have to release the valve in the front yard. Hi neighbors! Yay, day four of homeownership complete!

Then, at 4am when Isaac needed an entire onesie change, I thought I heard a noise in the back yard. I dismissed my paranoia at first, but as I finished snapping Mr. Isaac up I heard the back door rattle. I froze. Here I am with a tiny baby to protect, his bedroom light is on because we can’t find any lamp lightbulbs, I’m not even wearing any pants, Isaac is hiccuping loudly and we have an intruder. I walked through the dark living room (yikes!) to get back to the bedroom where I shook Chris awake. “Chris, I heard something.” “Mmrurmph.” “No Chris, you need to wake up. I heard someone at the back door.” “Alright alright, it was me.” The plumber had been unavailable, remember? “Sheesh! You can’t wake up when I ask you to bring me Isaac 20 minutes ago but you wake up to go outside?! Did you notice I wasn’t in bed? And you didn’t think to give me a heads up that you were going outside in the dark at 4am?!?! That was REALLY scary!!” This whole time Isaac’s baby hiccups are echoing around the bare walls. It seemed a lot more comical around the breakfast table a few hours later.


Anyway, our friends left showerless (sorry…good thing there’s that port-a-potty at the construction site next door) and we had the Internet guy, a plumber, and the city sewage crew at our house all before 8:30am.


I am keeping in mind a fine point Roosevelt made in his 1933 inaugural “we have nothing to fear but fear itself” speech, which is that our difficulties, thank God, are only material. He goes on to say that although everyone’s savings have vanished and uncertainty abounds, even yet “We are stricken by no plague of locusts.” That makes my problem of not being able to wash my hands or flush the toilet seem insignificant and petty, especially when a crew is outside working on the problem.


Hannie, hopefully we will have this fixed before y’all arrive at Casa de Krueger with the kitties next week!