We're shopped out!

But Otter is ready for school. We went to Sears today and found her 3 pairs of jeans as well as 3 blouses. She doesn't look like a little girl anymore, and her father is having a hard time dealing with that. I keep telling him that it's just beginning, that he should just relax but somehow I don't think he's going to!

Rent house update: The bathroom is completely finished, painted a nice light tan color and has new hardware fixtures. The closets in all 3 bedrooms have been painted, which we haven't done before but they really needed it. The master bedroom has paneling so it's pretty much done besides the carpet. The other two bedrooms have had a coat of Kilz put on them and when Otter & I left there a couple of hours ago Bill was about to start the color coat. It's white, so I don't know if color coat is the right title or not but you get the idea! We had planned on using some pale tan paint that we have on our walls at home, but Bill painted a test strip and it looked pink so we decided to just go with white. The walls in Otter's old room were pepto bismol pink at one point, and even through several coats of white the pink kept showing through. The Kilz took care of that, but after all the effort to get rid of the pink nobody wanted to paint that room a shade of pink again! The carpet will be pulled up possibly tomorrow, then we are going to have someone look at the floors. The house has hardwood floors, if they aren't in too bad a shape we will have them restored if it's a better price than carpet. Our leasing agent seems to think one of her contractors can do the wood floors for a better price than carpet. We'll see. The master bedroom will still have to be re-carpeted, since it's basically a cement slab floor and not hardwood.

Then I think Bill is going to take the light/ceiling fan out of Otter's old room and put it in the dining room since the one there is bad. We have a regular bedroom-type light fixture that came out of one room or the other at home and he's going to put it up in Otter's old room. We had originally planned to take the one out of our dining room and get a new one for home, but the one I have is not in the best shape either so eventually we'll just get a new one for us.

He's also going to borrow a power washer from our leasing agent, and use it on the garage since it really does need to be repainted as well. He fixed the problem on the garage door frame this morning or Friday afternoon. The front porch & steps have really old indoor/outdoor carpeting which is torn in spots so we are going to pull it up and he's going to power wash there as well. Then he's going to paint it with special paint that won't be slick if it gets wet. The carpeting is what we put down when we moved into the house, which was about 13 years ago and it has not worn well.

After all that, then I can actually do the rest of the cleaning. There are a lot of little things still to do, and most of the things Bill has to do that I've already mentioned are not extremely hard but it is still work.

3 days left of summer break for Otter, then school starts on Thursday!