New House = No Keys

For the first time in many many years, I am living through a regular professional day without any keys.

1) I don’t need car keys. I live less than a mile from work. I walked over this morning. I hope to do this more.
2) I don’t need house keys. The front door is a coded lock, I just punch in the number. (Or use an I-phone app to open it remotely.)

It feels ridiculously different and freeing to not be carrying keys around.

The New House: Scenes From the Move

As many of you know, the Muttrox clan just upgraded our living situation. Here are some scenes from the transition.

We haven’t sold the old house yet. They are getting it fixed up. Here are all the doors in a row, all painted white, all drying off.
doors

The most important move of them all! The hot tub is moved off the back porch, getting ready for transport to the new house. These are the same guys who brought it over in 2006, as soon as they came up the driveway they remembered the job.
tub

We foolishly used movers for only the big furniture. That means Mr. Muttrox has been going back and forth humping everything we own over the the new place. Here is our garage, nearly filled up with… stuff. The second one is a panorama shot.
g1
g2

For years, we’ve been sleeping on a queen size mattress and box spring lying on the floor. Not even a frame. One of the first things to get was a decent bed. This is one of the Westin Heavenly Bed kingsize mattresses. I don’t think a taser would have stopped him from jumping on it.

A great parenting moment. The new house had ladybugs in it. This is because they had to air it out during construction. Not a big deal, but we wanted to get rid of them. I figured there were forty or fifty. I offered the kids a ten cent per ladybug bounty, dead or alive. They found almost 250 of them! Well worth the money to have a bug-free house, and the kids were blown away by their windfall.
ladybug

The new house has very high ceilings, even in the (unfinished) basement. That seems great at first. But it also means that changing a light bulb is a get-out-the-ladder-job.
bulb