Edda is back at school! Yesterday was her first day back, but today she went without her NG tube. Jeremy’s at a work retreat about an hour away from the house – he’ll be back tomorrow afternoon. Fingers crossed we will be A-OK.
We’ve been working hard and spending money hard. Now that the college bills are done, we are trying to work on keeping the house from falling down. (I’m still giving Vince an allowance for food, but I’m eagerly waiting for his first meager grad school paycheck to clear so that I can stop giving him this $). This is new territory for both of us because the house was new build when we moved in and we paid zero attention to the house because we aren’t really very interested in it, but it is very much not new anymore. We are trying to make one of the secondary bedrooms with a fully accessible shower for Edda – she’s been showering all these years in the primary bathroom, which is fine, but we have little temporary ramps in there and it means that every single caregiver we’ve ever had has been in our bedroom all the time. So we’ve had contractors come and look – I have decor dreams like – I wanted penny tile in the floor bathroom, the contractor was like – there is a lot of grout for penny tiles, it’ll be hard to clean and maintain and they are prone to having problems. And then I thought- I don’t want penny tile in the bathroom. What I want is strong, easy to maintain and clean – which apparently means, no penny tile. (You know the old fashioned white hexagonal tile with the black hexagons that make a flower?, so lovely). The drainage around the house needs to be fixed as the driveway is tilted towards the house and the water is not effectively removed from where the driveway meets the house. Lots of texting with friends and family to ballpark what a reasonable estimate is and to get their invoices and all I can say it that it is EXPENSIVE.
I rented an apartment once with the hexagonal tiles and I swear to you I would spend hours on my knees to clean the grout with bleach and it was a teeny tiny space. It was pretty when it was clean, but it was rarely clean. I’m glad you’re not going to do that to yourself.