A Nice Little Goodbye Gift

I mentioned a few posts ago that one of our art quilt bee members was leaving the USA to return home to Melbourne, Australia.  I missed that last meeting that Marion attended, but she sent me a lovely card the next week.  In fact, it was the very first mail that we received at our new home!

Marion has been trying out different ways of weaving fibers together on different types of supports.  This piece is woven with fabrics and fibers and a little bit of metal.  Very cool!

She also made me an ATC (Artist Trading Card) and even used some of the fabric that I painted for her during our Fabric Embellishment Challenge.

Sure will miss that talented lady!

As far as my other bee, the Whacky Ladies, I am not sure how active I can be in that group.  They meet at night, and now I am forty-five minutes away from Wake Forest.  I would hate to drop out after being a Whacky for about seventeen years.  

So, we are still unpacking and trying to find things.  No luck yet on the silverware or knife set. but our bedroom and closet is about done.  We have not hung any pictures yet.  We have too much furniture for this house, and need to donate or sell some of it.  We should have done this before hiring people to move it!

As for the sewing room/studio, don't hold your breath!  The stuff is all piled up in there and I have to get the bathrooms and spare bedroom organized first.  One good thing...The Container Store is only about four minutes away.  I love that place!  I will probably head over there tomorrow.

Sold, Closed, Moved!

It has been an exhausting week, but a very good one.  We got the keys to our rental home one week ago.  The only thing I did not like about it was that the driveway was in very poor condition, full of potholes.  I found out that it will be repaved soon.  While we were at the house, we looked out the window and saw some of our new neighbors!  There were two little speckled fawns with their mama lurking behind them in the woods.

That weekend, both of our sons and their wives and children spent the weekend with us in Wake Forest one more time.  They took load after load of boxes and stuff from our old house to the new one.  The three older grands had a ball playing in the woods and along the edge of the pond.  And, they were the first ones to try out the hot tub!

We had a moving truck come on Wednesday to get the furniture.  Everything did not fit in the truck, so Charlie and I made two more trips on Thursday to get the last of it and clean out the old house.  We put the dog in the kennel during the move.  I just don't think she would understand that we were letting these men take all our belongings!  She is acting anxious and clingy, but I think she will enjoy it here once she gets used to it.

Since then we have been unpacking and trying to find things.  Today I finished the kitchen and pantry, but still have not found our silverware (the stainless variety) or our knife set.  We got the TV and Internet set up today, so we are starting to enjoy the comforts of home.  Not to mention soaking in the hot tub at the end of the day.  

At our closing, the new owners said that they would take good care of our home.  Well, it is their home now.

And we are getting familiar with this one, and I think we will enjoy the woodsy yard and pond and privacy.  This was the view out of the sliding glass doors in our bedroom this morning.  We feel very lucky.

New Digs

I was a little worried about selling our home and having an early closing without a new place to live lined up.  We were lucky to find a nice home for rent in northwest Raleigh that I think we will enjoy very much.

From the front, it looks like a ranch-style home.  Yes, that's concrete, no grass in the front to mow.  But it is surrounded by garden beds with hundreds of azaleas and an irrigation system.

The back of the house is what caught our interest.

Look at that lanai!  It is 54 feet long!  And it overlooks a hot tub and pond!

We are just renting this house for a year, so I am not too worried about all those steps in my old age. 

There is also a very nice kitchen, although I admit to not being much of a cook any more.

The kitchen, dining room, and living room all open to the lanai with sliding glass doors.

So, I now have good motivation for all the packing and preparations for the move.  

Now...which room will be my sewing room?  There is a room on the main floor with built-in shelves that will probably be the one.

But there is also a guest room downstairs that might fit the bill.

I think we will need to use the closets in the guest room in addition to the closets in the master bedroom, so that narrows down the choice.  All of the rooms are large enough for my twelve-foot longarm table, but I'm not sure we can get it in.  It might end up being in the garage.

Back to work...pack, pack, pack!  Oh, and baby Charlotte and her dog Roo will be with us until Tuesday while their parents are at a wedding in Colorado.  We pick her up tonight from her other grandma's house.  Hope she finds it amusing to watch us pack!