Today dad and Dominica are working on painting the stairway and upstairs hallway. With this round of painting the entire non-basement portion of the house will have been painted since we moved in ten months ago with the exception of the kitchen which was the only recently painted portion when we bought it. It really looks like a very new place compared to when we moved here. A drastic improvement, if I do say so myself. The hallway upstairs and going down the stairs was in pretty rough shape so this painting will really make a big difference. Hopefully all of this work will contribute to the saleability and the sale price of the house. We need to get it onto the market right away. If at all possible we really want to be in Texas in mid-December.
I have the day off today – what having a “day off” means. It is Columbus Day and it is a banking holiday so I am on call but am not required to be sitting at my workstation all day long taking care of things. This is really important because I am on “Liesl Duty” today taking care of Liesl as much as possible so that dad and Dominica can work on the painting.
Dad set up and entire scaffolding system so that they can paint the upper part of the hallway above the stairs. Quite an undertaking. He built the scaffolding at home and shipped it down in his car.
In addition to watching Liesl today I also spent several hours on the live chat feature of HP’s support system talking to a tech about getting the motherboard in my desktop swapped out. It is really a problem that I have not been able to use my laptop for the last several days and I don’t know what to do except to swap out the motherboard. I cannot pinpoint any single thing being the problem other than the fact that there are an inordinate number of transmit errors coming from this machine. I had to do a Vista install on the box as Windows 7 is not yet supported officially even though it has been released to partners and HP has the drivers available for it on their website. So that took up a very large portion of my day. Very important that we get this done, though, as having my desktop working is absolutely critical. I’ve been quite crippled and I don’t have the spare time to operate without my desktop working properly.
The painting went well and they were able to finish up with just a single coat of paint which worked out really well since dad had mixed the paint himself using colours that we already had from painting other parts of the house so getting more of it was not an option. It was really nice that we were able to use up paint that already existed and did not have to buy any extra just for this. Saving money is really, really important these days.
With the new coat of paint the house really looks a lot better. This is going to make it that much easier to sell. The upstairs hallway and the stairway were really in rough shape before. This is a big improvement. It is crappy that we didn’t do this in time to be able to live in the house and enjoy the way that it looks but at least we will get it for the last month or two that we are here. We don’t have any idea when we are moving to Texas yet so it might be a little while yet or it might be quite some time.