Kristin Laura

Early this morning while lying awake in bed, I did some mental math and realized I will be retiring from my career in IT almost exactly 30 years from the day I started my first job out of college.  It is a bittersweet experience.  While I’m excited about the next chapter in my life and our big adventure moving to Idaho, I’m also sad to bring my IT career to a close and leave my work family.  I have spent 40+ hours per week for the last 30 years solving problems, writing code, implementing systems, learning new technologies, meeting with customers, counseling staff, reading email, and attending way too many meetings. To help me through this change, I started thinking about all the things I won’t miss, like those meetings.  People compliment me on my copious note-taking in meetings.  Here’s the truth, I started taking notes in boring meetings to keep from falling asleep and then it just became a habit.  I started with legal pads and saved the loose l...

We spent the majority of our day working on the guest room flooring.  An early morning trip into Coeur d’Alene (CDA from now on because it’s easier to type) for more flooring and assorted supplies at Home Depot.  You can’t go into town without a trip to Home Depot to buy and/or return stuff. Yesterday we pulled up all the carpet, pad and tack strip and filled the holes in the floor of the guest room.  This morning we rolled out contact adhesive around the perimeter of the room and closet.  Then we just started slapping down the vinyl planks.  The center of the room was done in no time, but cutting the planks for the ends, edges and doorways took a few hours.  It looks much better than the original gray indoor/outdoor that was there originally.  We will paint and install new base boards when we return in March. Empty with indoor/outdoor carpet Contact adhesive applied New flooring Today I noticed that I would walk from room to room ...

There were so many other blog titles that went through my mind today while tearing out carpet, such as “Carpet is Disgusting”, “I Know Where All the Dead Skin Cells Go”, “What the Hell Were These People Doing on Their Carpet?  Sacrificing Animals?”  We have been tearing out carpet for two days, and it is gross.  We are going to install 3,000 square feet of “luxury vinyl flooring” that looks like gray weathered planks.  It is waterproof and nearly indestructible.  No more dead skin cells filtering into the carpet pad.  I see a Roomba in my future. The debris pile is growing Vinyl flooring acclimating before installation Toilet replacement was one of the first projects on the list.  Shawn was not going to use another man’s throne, especially one with a wooden (ick) toilet seat. Dethroned This house has about a million doors, and half of them don’t shut or lock properly.  Shawn replaced the doorknob on the garage door so it would c...

On December 30, 2017, we closed on our new house in Idaho.  We sent 2 out of 3 PODs worth of our stuff to Idaho in the first week of January, and now we are spending a week in Idaho.  We had great plans of arriving on Saturday afternoon and having a few hours to unpack our bed and necessities before sundown.  Yeah, that didn’t happen.  Our flight from Sacramento to Spokane was delayed an hour and a half.  The sun was going down as we raced from the airport to Home Depot to get a couple lamps, an extension cord and a snow shovel before heading to our new house in Worley, Idaho. There was a tiny bit of light left when we drove up the driveway.  Our new neighbor, Kyle, stopped by and gave us the lowdown on how he had plowed our driveway for the delivery of our PODs.  Kyle was very nice and we truly appreciated his efforts.   Kyle is a busy guy this time of year as he has a trapline that needs to be tended to every 72 hours.  Unfortunately, ...

When you live in a house for years, there are just some things you start overlooking…the missing tile in the corner of the bathroom; the hole in the closet for the CAT 5 cable you installed pre-wifi; that overgrown corner of the yard that no one sees; the unpermitted electrical in the garage.  It turns out you need to deal with those things if you want to get top dollar for your house.  Our realtor, Joey, also gave us a lot of other suggestions to improve the salability of our 21 year old house. Shawn had a lot of shelves and electrical built into the garage.  That all had to come out and then Joey suggested painting the walls white to give a cleaner, larger, brighter look.  If you’re going to have a 4 year old “help” on a painting project, the garage is probably the best place.  To fill the holes left by the electrical conduit, Shawn found this nifty spackle that goes on pink and turns white when it’s dry.  No more trying to paint over wet spackle. ...

I completely underestimated what a huge undertaking moving would be.  We have lived in our current 4-bedroom, 3-bath home for 21 years.  We’ve raised 3 children from school-aged through college.  We’ve remodeled, repainted, redesigned and repurposed rooms many times.  We have acquired new tastes and hobbies and all their accoutrements over two decades.  We have accumulated stuff. The first step in moving was to get rid of some stuff.  I started with my closet.  Having gained and lost weight and finally settled at a maintainable size, it was time to let go of the extreme sized clothes on both ends of the spectrum.  Knowing I am retiring soon also allowed me to let go of a lot of career clothing.  Many bags of clothing headed to Goodwill.  My husband, Shawn, did the same on his side of the closet. We cleared out our mini-storage and put the stored stuff in our garage so we could have everything in one place and get a better idea o...