Goin' on a scorpion hunt

The great scorpion scourge of aught nine is in full swing. We had the house fully sprayed inside and out the day we moved in. And they've been back to spray once again since I called, my voice a full octave above normal.

We have the best exterminators in the state.

They're still finding their way in and so PB and I have begun hours of endless research on what to do.

Apparently the poison doesn't actually KILL them. It drives them out of hiding and eliminates their food source. It also encourages my husband and his four girls to capture one and keep him in a jar that is currently sitting on my coffee table. They have shaken the jar to "see him get mad" and dropped in many dead crickets to "see if he'll eat them".

It's like some bizarre horror film.

So, we go onto YouTube and find bojillions of hilarious videos involving hunting for scorpions. It's quite a sport involving a black lite (which PB is enthusiastic about purchasing tomorrow) because the particular scorpions in this area will glow green under a black lite.

Good times.

So we've watched videos of epic battles set between scorpions and black widows set to a soundtrack of Nine Inch Nails. We've watched Redneck Scorpion Hunting and a scorpion taped to the side of a cardboard box while people take target practice at it. And my favorite...Bob Ross goes hunting for scorpions. Click on this link...

http://www.onefast1.com/movies/SH2006.mov

Tell me his voice is not hilarious. "Let's look here, between these two bricks. Ah, there's one now. This guy will put a world of hurt on you." All narrated in such a soft, soothing voice.

Such calmness, such poise.

I'm SO going to record our scorpion hunt tomorrow night. I'll narrate and post it here for you to enjoy.

Please stand by...

I started painting as I promised, but I just have a little more to go before I can show you the finished product. I want you to get the full effect. I'll finish this afternoon and have the big reveal tomorrow morning.

But for now, I wanted to do a consumer review of the paint I used. I said I would go to Sherwin Williams, but my mom happened to call and I was telling her that I hoped the paint would help the house smell like mine.

I'm big on house smells. We got rid of the tee tee and so that is gone, but I'm finding the funk is multi-layered. Now it smells pungent, kind of like a mix between bug spray and curry. Weird.

I've even pulled out Tiffany's super secret recipe to her house smell.

Please pause to put "Go smell Tiffany's house" on your life list of things to do before you die. It smells awesome.

Anywho...so my mom says to me, "Honey, go get the paint with the primer in it." Now, KILZ makes paint, but that's not what she was talking about. Behr makes paint with primer in it. I told you that none of the Behr blues were quite right, but desperate to make this house smell like mine, I sent PB down to the Home Depot with color swatch in hand and instructions to get me 2 gallons of satin Behr with the primer already in it.

I was also covering a dark color with a much lighter one. By the way, the green was a nice green just not me.

So, I got to painting and at first was disappointed. Even with the primer in it, I had to do a second coat. I was kind of hoping to avoid this step using the paint with the primer. I actually found it to be a little thinner than regular Behr.

At first I was hating the paint and cursing it. But then I went to eat some lunch and came back and the room smelled HEAVENLY! It smelled like cinammony freshness.

Please accept my smell descriptions.

I am loving the Behr paint with the primer in it now. I am not impressed with the coverage perse', but I do like how it covered up the smell in that particular room. We still have a whole house to deal with (which makes PB fall prostrate to the floor).

A formal living room "before"

It was your resounding cry for "before" and "after" pictures that has me gleefully skipping to my friendly neighborhood Sherwin Williams store this morning.

I'm usually a Home Depot Behr paint girl, but I'm not loving any of the blues they offer, so Sherwin Williams seems the next logical step.

I'm looking for a lovely, soft, powdery blue for my formal living room. Right now it is army green.

Behold...

A nice enough green, I suppose, but sooooo not my style. I'm trying to be nice here. And we won't speak of the Pergo. I have strong feelings about Pergo. I am a flooring snob as you will see in a later post. I can't help what I like, people.

So, consider this your "before" picture. If all goes as planned, you will soon have an after picture to accompany it.

Heat waves, and boxes, and scorpions...oh my!!

Good gravy, I've been up to my ears in cardboard the past week.

We got the cat tee tee replaced and thus began the big move in. I don't recommend doing it when it's 110 outside. I must've lost 10 pounds.

We are loving the Valley of the Sun and fully know why they call it that now. It's hot, people. Hot tub hot. I'm not in any way complaining, though. I love the heat. I love the desert.

I did not love the scorpion boldly sitting on my kitchen floor two mornings ago. They are as unpredictable in their movements as birds or mice and have thus earned themselves a personality. They are also very mean.

I swept it into a dust pan that (thankfully) closes once you lift it up off the floor. It thrashed wildly in that dustpan and we all screamed. Well, PB was at work so he didn't scream. He might've though.

And so if mice have a French accent, and birds are clearly British, I must say that scorpions must all have Mexican accents. It's absolutely nothing derogatory, just the way I hear them in my head.

Because I'm weird.

Phoenix

We're here!! In all of it's 115 degree glory, we cruised into Phoenix and jumped into the pool. No, not the pool at our new house. The pool at the hotel. Remember, we have cat tee-tee to deal with first. Plus, the new house doesn't have a pool quite yet. That's in the grand master plan for the coming year.

The kids aren't quite sure of the heat and PB is putting on a brave face for my sake. I, however, am LOVING it. No cold toes is a beautiful thing.

And I feel at home and settled. We'll get the keys tomorrow and I'm already making painting plans. I finally get to nest again and so all is right with the world.

The house in Colorado is empty (and still on the market if you're looking) and so I don't have to worry about keeping it spotless for surprise showings. Yeee haw!!

So, I'll post when I can over the next few days. I can't wait for life to get back to normal.

A real estate lesson...by Heather

Such brilliant suggestions all of you had! We do have a hotel reserved for the first week we're there. We figured that until we get in there and see what all needs to be done, we'd better plan on staying in a hotel.

We bought a bank owned home and got an amazing deal. We've had it inspected and it passed with flying colors, but I'm still nervous that we'll find little things.

So many of you asked why anyone would take all the switchplate covers. Trust me...she could've done ALOT worse.

When I went out to look for a house, I told my agent to just show me bank owned homes as they are at rock bottom pricing and there's none of the hassle like with a short sale. I learned alot and thought I'd pass some tips along.

When a person or people decides they can't afford to live in their house anymore, or the market has become so bad that they owe more on their house than it's worth, they go to the bank that financed the home and ask if they can sell it for less than what they owe. This is called a short sale.

A short sale can be veeeeery tricky and I, personally, avoided them.

The bank has to approve the price the owners want to sell the house for. The bank uses a fancy schmancy formula to arrive at a price that the market will bear and the bank can take a loss on.

Here's where it gets tricky...

The people will often list their house BEFORE the bank has approved the price. This is standard and understandable. They'll list it for what the houses around them are listed for hoping to get an offer or multiple offers. That way, they can go to the bank with an offer in hand in hopes that the bank will approve the price and they can sell their house right away.

However, this sometimes doesn't work.

Based on what the people still owe on their house, the bank may not approve the price.

Once the bank has approved (or given them) the sale price of the house, everyone is one step closer to being done. However, getting that bank approved price can take a long time. The banks are in NO hurry to lose any more money.

SO, the next step is where the big game begins. The price on the MLS (listing) of the house may look great. You may be looking at a $300,000 home with a listing price of $98,000. You think it's the deal of a lifetime and you enthusiastically put in your offer and wait for your dreams to come true.

BUT here's the trick. The real listing price might not be $98,000. It might actually be $220,000 (I'm exaggerating the pricing to make a point). The agent will put an unbelievable price on the MLS to bring in multiple offers and drive the bidding up to what the bank wants.

This. takes. months!! Up to a year sometimes. In the meantime, you're competing for investors who are paying cash for these houses. You have to act fast and be aggressive. You have to do lots and lots of research in public records to see what the original purchase price of the house was to get a sense of what might still be owed on the house. You have to know if they had a second mortgage and if they're short on that too. That means TWO banks have their hands in the pot.

You also have to know how many bids the house has on it when you bid on it. And if you really love the house, you have to bid the very MOST you can afford. You have to ask what the bank approved price is and you often will not know what the highest bid is.

It's like Ebay on steroids.

It's because of all of this that I chose to avoid a short sale. These houses are beautiful and so many of them looked like such good deals and I knew the families living in them were good people. I just didn't have the time or patience to play the short sale game.

Tomorrow...tips and hints on buying a bank owned home.

A relocating stream of consciousness.

I haven't really come out and said as much, but you probably figured it out. We bought a house out in Arizona and we're moving at the end of this week.

Packing gets harder every time we move.

I'm not a packrat at all. In fact, I throw too much away and will sometimes regret it. I hate clutter. I love to decorate and often will hit garage sales and clearance aisles, but I won't keep stuff we don't need which should make packing easier.

At least you'd think it would make it easier, but the fact remains that we still have soooooo much stuff.

And on top of packing, planning, and getting ready for a huge road trip I have to time things just so in order to prepare the new house to live in. All things considered, it was left in fairly good condition but the previous owner had an animal that wasn't house broken. There's some of the opinion that said pet was a dog. I'm almost positive it was a cat.

Irregardless, all of the carpet needs replacing and the sub floor needs to be Kilz'ed. Yeah...it's bad. Not so bad that we ran away from the house screaming but bad enough that I turned to PB and said, "I love it, but I shan't live in it until the cat tee tee has been dealt with."

The previous owner also took all of the switch plate covers from every. outlet. in. the. house.

Strange, no?

Yes.

So, I am in the process of...

...packing, saying goodbye, figuring out how we're going to rip out the carpet and Kilz the floor without causing the Twinfants (VERY allergic to cats) to break out into two giant walking hives and then live on the subfloor for the 2 weeks it takes to get the carpet in and installed without putting any furniture onto the floors to be carpeted, calling an exterminator, scheduling the vents to be cleaned and a refrigerator to be delivered and planning how we're going to get all new switchplate covers onto the exposed electrical outlets before someone can (inevitably) insert a metal object into any one of them and give themselves a perm.

(deep breath)

And really that's only the tip of the ice berg. I won't prattle on about getting children withdrawn from school here and registered for school there or change of address forms or the episodes of True Blood I might miss.

Or that I do not like the colors she painted on the walls.

I've got two weeks with no carpeting on the floor. What would you do?

Pasture On The Water

This is quite possibly the coolest art I have ever seen.

The art installation by Bulgarian artist Pavel Koichev 'Pasture on the water' is displayed on the surface of a lake near the village of Osikovica, east of the Bulgarian capital Sofia, Wednesday, June, 3, 2009. The art installation will be at the lake until June, 10.

My lack of artistic understanding (as evidenced by this post) blinds me to the symbolism in most pieces. And I'm sure I have no idea about the meaning behind this art installation, but I like it.

At least I know what I like.