My family and I have been renting a home in Highlands Ranch since we moved here last summer. We finally decided to take the plunge and BUY a home, we closed June 30th. The lease on the rental runs through the end of this month. So my vacation was spent getting the new house ready and then moving the stuff from the OLD house. Certainly not as much fun as a road trip to Yellowstone or a jet to Cancun.

I’ve alluded before to our “adventure in tile.” The home we bought had carpeting in both of the upstairs bathrooms. My wife [let me be clear, I'm NOT blaming her] started things when she told me that she was willing to replace that carpet with tile. Good plan. Then, we got the idea of tiling the formal living and dining rooms as well–”as long as we’re tiling.” From there, it was only a small leap of logic to decide that not just ANY tile would do for a formal living area, we needed to do something special. At the offices of the title company where we had the closing on the house, the floors of the foyer were done in a beautiful slate material. “Why don’t we do THAT for OUR living and dining room?,” I suggested. YIKES! In retrospect, it’s so easy to see how insidiously this scheme unfolded! What started out as a simple few squares of tile in the bathroom developed into a full-blown tile melt-down.

Well, long story short–we started working on the slate floor the weekend BEFORE I went on vacation, 4th of July weekend. We just NOW finished putting on the final coat of sealer on the stone, Monday the 21st. That’s almost two weeks. There were a few days where me and my wife and her erstwhile parents worked non-stop from eight in the morning to past midnight. All this to say, if you’re thinking about doing this kind of tile, let me tell you–it’s HARD work, and very tedious. And, no, I won’t do it for you–even for money!!  However, it DID turn out beautiful!

The “move” part of the vacation went pretty well. We rented a truck for a day and moved most of it ourselves, but hired a moving company to move about a dozen items that were either too bulky or too heavy to move ourselves. They did a great job, BTW–if you’re interested, let me know and I’ll tell you which company it was.

Moving is always so awkward, from a relationship standpoint, isn’t it? I hate to ask people to help, because it’s just so NOT fun! Even when people OFFER to help, I feel hesitant taking them up on it. I suppose some people really MEAN it when they offer to help you move–but you wonder if they’re just being polite.

At any rate, we’re moved, we’re tiled, I’m back to work. Normalcy has returned to the Henderson House.