On Friday around two o’clock we signed the final papers and became official owners of a real live house. It was mildly surreal: after running around for four weeks having meetings, calling various institutions and services to send things to different people and so forth, actually sitting down in the conference room with the notary and having her read through the contract and point out various disbursements before we signed, then sitting with the sellers and signing a much shorter contract was so quiet and less stressful than we’d expected. In fact, we had fun with the sellers while waiting for the notary to call them in, and again after we’d rejoined them and signed everything. The notary almost had to kick us out. The only bad news was the amount of the welcome tax, which is going to be more than a year’s worth of property tax. I sincerely hope they let us break it into multiple payments.

We had intended to go scoop the boy up from school early and let him take down the sold sign that was still in front of the house, but the selling agent said that it was actually her responsibility (and property) and she just hadn’t had the time. She was already there unscrewing it when we arrived, sans boy. This was our first look at it completely empty.

It is kind of like a dollhouse. It’s quite small, but well proportioned. There’s a lot of work ahead in the patching of large holes left by the screws they used to hang pictures, evening out the paint lines on the walls in order to have a smooth surface to paint, and the painting itself, especially because there needs to be one of those huge buckets of primer purchased in order to cover the dark brown, purple, gray, raspberry, and neon green with cobalt blue rooms. (Yeah. So not us.) HRH is over there today doing the spackling and plastering, then mowing and trimming the jungle the previous owners left for us. Then this week is solid painting. I am having minor existential crisis about the colours for the kitchen and living room, as the space is pretty much flows from one to the other. It’s either a green-tinged tan for the kitchen and a mid-green for the living room, or the mid-green for the kitchen and a darker sage green for the living room. The latter was my first choice and still the forerunner in my mind, because I am concerned that with a tan in the kitchen it will all be sort of a big neutral block, since the cupboards are all beige as well and they make up the majority of the kitchen. Also, the darker green is called Mermaid’s Eyes, and really, how can I pass that up?

We had time to kill between dropping the boy off at school on Friday morning and our notary appointment, so we did some recon regarding our laundry set and the loveseat for the living room. We think we’ve settled on the laundry system, and now we’re just waiting on a reply from the commercial salesguy at The Brick, with whom our real estate agent’s company has a deal regarding preferred pricing. Time’s getting tight, though, so I’ll send him another e-mail today, and if I haven’t heard from him by Tuesday I’ll switch to the guy located at the branch near our new house instead. I’m getting frustrated regarding a loveseat, too. The living room is tiny, and all the loveseats we’re seeing are surprisingly large. We wanted something light-looking, too, and apparently that sort of style is Not In at the moment; everything is overstuffed. Also, what is with all the leather and microsuede in the furniture options? Why can’t I have simple upholstery? We thought perhaps a futon might work, as the frames for those tend to be light-looking, but even they are too long for the space. We went to four different furniture stores that morning alone, and I’m at my wits’ end. In the final one I saw a chaise lounge I liked, and we realised that one of those would be less visually weighty, as well as comfortable and would allow for two people to sit if necessary. So suddenly that’s an option. (It has just occurred to me that the one I saw and liked is the colour of wheat, and would go beautifully with the Mermaid’s Eyes paint. And I’d already noted that it has the additional bonus of being the precisely right height if I wanted to sit on the end to play the cello or spin.)

We checked out the Dix-30 shopping complex before the notary appointment as well, because I needed to pick up a gift for the sellers at the SAQ and a book at Indigo. The Indigo is pretty, relaxing, and polished, although smaller than I am used to. Their children’s sections are very nice, though.

I am out of commission this weekend. I’d been having increasing difficulty with my left hip and lower back, and near the middle of the week I thought it was getting better. Then on Thursday I moved the wrong way and the right hip did something weird, so I couldn’t move at all without a lot of pain and problems. I dug out the muscle relaxants for an initial strike, used Tylenol after that, and the heating pad a lot. I’ve been really, really careful over the past two days, but that specific pain on top of the general fibro achiness and exhaustion aren’t doing my temper or stamina any favours. I’m glad we’re about 75% packed.

This week I pack the last of the household while HRH works over at the new house. We have to figure out an alternate route to the new place for moving day, because the bridge is going to be down to one lane from its usual three and traffic is going to be a nightmare as a result. Our usual alternate route across the Mercier bridge and around the seaway isn’t an option because the mileage will kill us when added to the truck rental, so it looks like it may have to the the Jacques-Cartier bridge, as the Victoria bridge has a height and weight restriction and is cars-only.

HRH fit twenty-one book boxes in the car this morning. He’s very pleased. If he can take twenty boxes of that size over each trip, that puts a significant dent in the amount that have to be moved on the actual moving day. (Significant being one hundred boxes. You can’t knock that.)

In non-house news, we managed a brief visit with Ceri, Ada, and Scott in the hospital and were completely enchanted by tiny Ada Emily. They stopped by on their way home from a hospital appointment yesterday to pick up the baby equipment we had put aside for them, and the boy got to meet Ada, who slept through the whole visit. He sat a bit behind me on the chesterfield while I held her and just looked at her with a little smile on his face. He wouldn’t touch her, though; I think we may have gotten him to barely touch a finger, but I can’t remember if he actually made contact with it or not. He did whisper to me at one point, “She just said hi.” “Did she say anything else?” I asked, aware that the baby had been fully silent in her boneless state of babysleep. “No, just hi,” he said.

We had the local grandparents booked for babysitting last night, as the original plan had been to go out with Ceri and Scott to celebrate the beginning of Ceri’s maternity leave and our signing for the house, and they urged us to go out anyway. So we went to see Scott Pilgrim vs. The World, which had been part of that original plan, and we loved it. The only thing missing was having Ceri and Scott along with us to make it the best possible experience, but I am plotting to see if we can make that happen somehow.

So here we are in the home stretch. I’m really hoping my body holds together long enough to accomplish the last of what I need to do this week. Tylenol is my friend, as is the heating pad and the occasional Robaxacet. We can do it.