After a month-long ordeal, we've finished the nursery in our house and it's ready for the baby to move in!

One of the strange things about this house when we moved into it was that it had a third bedroom on the upper floor that wasn't shown in any of the photos that the estate agent provided. And when we looked at it, it was easy to see why - the room was entirely clad in wood and had two beds built into the floor, taking away all the space and making it look not so much a friendly bedroom as a room that a mortician might use to prepare bodies. But it had potential, and so with no experience in redecorating, we set about transforming it.


This was what the room looked like at the start, with some tape around the ceiling and windows in anticipation of the painting that was to come. Some of these photos might accidentally give the impression that the wood had charm to it, but in reality it just made the room perpetually dreary. But that wasn't the worst problem with it...


With the help of my father- and brother-in-law, we demolished the fixed box-bed-slabs and threw their bits in the back garden. You wouldn't believe just how much wood there was in these things - far more than you would think necessary to support someone's weight, and we've still to arrange taking it away or cutting it up to use as firewood. That was the first struggle, and it revealed another difficulty - whoever had installed these had removed entire sections of the wall and floor to accommodate them. They're not even just taken off cleanly - they've been sawn through, exposing the bare floor and insulation behind them. I can't imagine how the person responsible never thought, during the lengthy procedure of putting these in, that it would be easier to just buy a couple of beds.


At the end of the first day of their visit, after a trip to Home Depot that lasted several hours and a lot of work on top of that, we got to here - drywall has been mounted on the giant gaps left by the beds and it's been spackled in. My father-in-law also bought a load of tools to assist with the suddenly-elongated job of redecorating the room, and said to consider them a birthday present!


The process of filling in the gaps in the floor was a much more tedious slog, cutting planks of flooring to fit, nailing them down and progressing slowly row by row. It took all day, but the end results were two filled-in floor sections and this apocalyptic mess.


After clearing that up, it was finally time to prepare the room for painting - a couple of days later than we had thought, and with the family back in California by now, we were on our own without extra help for this. I taped off the borders and put down a plastic sheet to cover the newly patched floor, but didn't realize that the air vent on the ground in the corner would cause it to inflate like a bouncy castle.


After cutting a hole for the vent to breathe and spending a day rolling primer on to the walls, I was successful in making the room look significantly worse. It looks patchy and awful but all it needs to do is get paint to stick to it - and if you try to ignore how shabby it looks, ou can already see that the room looks a lot brighter as a result.


This is more like it! It took three coats of the yellow paint and a large effort from both of us to get it to be really convincing, but the room was beginning to come together now.


With the painting over, we could take up the plastic at last, and installed some new lights to replace the weird boat-wheel themed ones that used to be in the room. (Yes, only one works. I'm still looking into that.) Whitney had the idea of putting some fabric on to the lower wall to act as a skirting-board - I don't know where that came from, but the result looks great and provides a softer surface for a toddler's head to crash into. She put together the pieces and we tacked them up with a staple-gun.


Then it was my turn again, adding a painted wooden trim around the top of the fabric. With a length of general-purpose rail from Home Depot and the tools left with me by the floor-cutting stage, I was able to feel my way into fashioning some pretty convincing ninety-degree joins.


With that task finished, the scraps from it cleared up and a rug-pad put down, the room was finally ready to receive its furniture...


...which arrived today! This is a collection of new furniture, things that Whitney's family handed down to us and some great finds from people in the surrounding area who were trying to get rid of their old stuff. It's beginning to feel very real now - this room will be occupied in something like seven weeks' time!

Whitney's away for a few days and there are going to be some changes around here! I've started by resolving to clean out the fridge - we do this occasionally, but there's always the layer next to the wall at the back beyond the stuff you actually use, where things gradually get pushed and forgotten about and nobody dares to look.

Today, I dared to look. And I found:

• A jar of mould with a small layer of apple sauce at the bottom
• Flaccid vegetables
• A Tupperware container of indistinct horribleness (assumed to have once been fish)
• Extremely overly sour cream
• Sour cream (was unfortunately meant to be just whipped)
• Surprisingly intact jam
• Liquid watermelon
• Cheese dated last month
• Cheese dated last year
• Cheese dated 2011
• Cheese that I'm unsure was meant to be intentionally blue
• The remains of King Louis XIV
• THIS
• Putrefaction
• Decay
• Rot
• Pestilence
• Death
• Tofu
• Various fruit cups (sources unknown)
• Some of those little tubs of liquid from Chinese restaurants (sauces unknown)
• Three jars containing one pickle each
• A lone, sad sausage
• A burning sensation on my fingers after having to handle all of the above

I feel proud of the achievement, but unfortunately the fridge doesn't even look cleaner now because all the stuff that was thrown out was in the depths of despair at the back where you never see it anyway. Perhaps I'll shove a couple of cardboard boxes in there just to keep the fridge space down to an amount that's actually usable.

Next time, the rest of the kitchen.

Whenever I see one of these on the front door from a distance, I always have the most irrational pang of panic that somebody's issued my house a parking ticket.

Paraphrasing slightly:

Thank you for installing Adobe Flash Player 10.x . Your hard drive is 12% fragmented, and we recommend that you download this tool to increase your computer's efficiency:

What the hell are you doing poking about on my hard drive? I relented and allowed you to install something after your incessant badgering - put it down and go away, don't critique the wallpaper while you're in there. It's bad enough that you now have to actively tell things that you don't want an Ask toolbar installed into IE, or a free McAfee scan during the download. It's becoming more and more expected that if you're on Windows, it does what other people want it to rather than what you do - drop your guard for a second and you'll get all sorts of garbage you don't want piled into your operating system.

In a vaguely comparable real-life story, I've also found out this week that the National Grid in America shows exactly the same model of efficiency that you would expect from the GASMAAAAAAAAN in Britain - over the past few weeks there had been a barrage of phone calls with them insisting that they had to set up an appointment to replace the gas meter, and I'd always passed them off to the condo association, who had to get them to guarantee that they could only do it in place of the current one and not modify the outside of the building. With that sorted out, they phoned me again, finally set up a date on which they would come and do it, I stayed at home yesterday to let them in and they didn't grant me the courtesy of turning up.

I'm glad that people appreciated my non-story of what dinner was like last night - I had been planning to set up a post like that for some time, ever since I was sitting on the sofa with my awful dinner and shortened finger two weeks ago and thinking about how days alone would be better planned so that they were survivable. Unfortunately, it was a lie - or at least it didn't tell the whole truth, and the answer to ravenworks' question of whether I ever have normal dinners is probably a resounding "no".

You see, there is a moose, and furthermore, it seems to be loose aboot this hoose. I first noticed it when I saw a dark cloud zoom across the kitchen floor and back out of the corner of my eye when I was working at the dining table. At first I thought it might be an earwig because we'd had a couple of those when we first moved in, but it was far too big and too fast unless it was the King of the Land of Earwigs himself. I decided that it was probably my imagination.

Then I looked again when messaging lupineangel, and there it was - a small dark brown thing, not nearly as nice-looking as you might have been led to believe, staring back at me from the wooden floor. As we made eye contact it took off again under a cupboard, leaving me to incoherently type "MOUSE" for a few lines before calming down and trying to decide what to do about it.

He suggested peanut butter in a very Elmer Fudd style trap of a shoebox, pencil and bit of string, but we don't have any of that, and I decided it probably wasn't worth it to spend my evening that way - besides, those cartoons always involved him shooting himself in the face with a hunting rifle, and that's even worse than anything I've done to myself in the kitchen. I couldn't find it by shining a torch under the counters, and when the pizza arrived, I resolved to just forget about it and plan another day (though I have a big tub ready to throw over it if I get the chance).

So we'll have to try mousetraps or something (this also solves a mystery that we had earlier on when a bait station we hadn't bought suddenly appeared in the middle of the kitchen floor one day - it must have been kicked out from under a cupboard by him.) And Whitney's been wanting a cat for ages - perhaps this is a reason to finally get one, so that he can try to catch it while we're out with some sort of elaborate arrangement involving the ironing board, a cheese grater, and an anvil suspended from the ceiling.

In between the flurry of often overambitious DIY-related tasks we've been doing this weekend, we've finally met the people we're living next door to - this was yet another task that we failed at the last weekend we were here, as we had heard movement next door while we were smashing hammers on door hinges, but when we went round nobody answered the door... I'd been terrified that they'd stalked off for a walk being unable to stand the new neighbours.

But it turns out we're next to a nice woman who's beginning to pack up to move out in a couple of months. For the moment she's the perfect neighbour for people who are setting up a house, one of whom is a metal listener (and player, technically, though I'm not exactly very good) - because she's quite hard of hearing, so we're unlikely to annoy her all that much through the shared wall during our time here.

We'd already seen our neighbour across the path on the other side, a young man with a motorbike, because he'd been outside when we first arrived to do the walkthrough the morning we bought the place. As it happens, among the mountains of junk mail we got in our first in-person delivery of post yesterday was a subscription extension card for a very naughty magazine that was meant to go to him - I took it round and pushed it under his door rather than introduce myself with "Hello, this is yours!" We'll meet him properly later.

We had also been stealing wireless Internet from the nice old lady next door until this morning, when the Comcast man came around and spent a while here setting up the television and our modem and router. The office downstairs is pretty much complete now, and the USB wireless receiver I got four years ago is finally coming in useful for the first time - my desktop is set up and running, and I finally have a working computer again. And 328 new emails.

We're really moving, aren't we. Yes, we are. It used to seem so far off, but the majority of our stuff is now in cardboard boxes and the rest of the stuff lying around is easily scrapable into yet more boxes when the morning comes. In a moment, we're going to turn off the router - which feels strangely like disappearing entirely from the outside world even just for one day - and the next anyone will know, we'll have moved into the new house.

I still remember stepping into this flat for the first time, with our worldly possessions being carried with us in a few suitcases (and two bank cheques with the entire contents of a Californian account all but superglued to my waist under my clothing). We slept on a blanket on the floor, and then went out in an attempt to get a bed and some furniture. Four years later, it's come a long way, and feels much more like home. We've certainly accumulated a lot of... stuff - this move feels much bigger than the last one, because last time we might as well have just been going on holiday, for all the things that we had to take with us. This time, the spread of blankness has been gradually travelling across the flat and into a pile of boxes at one end of the room... tomorrow we're relying on a group of men from Gentle Giant to come in and remove them and all our furniture, and we'll follow them to the new house with our remaining perishable food in a hired car, leaving the flat once again white and empty.

To finalize the image of us moving on, I threw the sorry remains of the Frankendresser that IKEA sold us that first day on to the rubbish pile. Quite opposite from any sadness of leaving our flat, I was very pleased to finally get rid of the worthless artefact.

Ring ring. Ring ring. Click.

"Hello, this is Allstate Insurance, with the man who stands just outside the boundaries of time while you have an accident."

"Hi, I've just read on your site that you don't sell home insurance to Massachusetts online - is that saying I need to do it over the phone?"

"No, we don't operate in the state of Massachusetts."

"Right. Why are you called Allstate, then?"

Ring ring. Ring ring. Eine Kleine Nachtmusik. Your call is important to us. Click.

"Good morning, this is Nationwide Insurance, and our adverts are nowhere near as psychotic as our namesake in Britain."

"Hi, do you offer home insurance in Massachusetts?"

"No."

"Then shouldn't you be called Nationwide-Except-Massachusetts?"

We got home insurance from a local company in the end. They were very efficient indeed.

We own a house. This hasn't really sunk in yet, perhaps because we're not actually moving in until the middle of next month - but there's a townhouse in Watertown that I now have the keys to, dangling from my keyring via a classy paperclip. If you want a summary of the entire process since March, there's a very rare Whitney post that went up today, and that goes over it all again.

We spent the whole afternoon and evening there after the closing, wandering around The Village and trying to understand how to work the air conditioner - in fact, we did a lot more than I thought we were going to do, and ended up painting an entire room. I had never done any DIY-related work like that before, but trying it together felt like claiming the house as our own.

I wonder if it would appear classist of me to suggest that America's B&Q Warehouse under a different name, the Home Depot, is staffed by shambling, semi-aware zombies. They're nice zombies like in Earthbound, though, and even though they can't understand me and I can't understand them, sometimes a message gets through. One of them, whose name was Koskov when he was alive, made sure to give us $5 rebates on the massive amount of paint that we bought, and we also got a contractor's discount which the ex-woman at the checkout completely failed to understand. After doing that, I can tell you that the paint roller is one of the greatest inventions ever - the last time I'd seen a room in my parents' house being painted, my dad was in there over a period of about five weeks using a brush on the walls.

The event that the last few months had led up to was the closing, where we finally met our lawyer face to face - she said that she always tried to imagine what people looked like from their phone conversations, and that I looked a lot younger than my voice had led her to believe. The sellers weren't there, but their lawyer was, and over the next hour we set up a sort of production line of signing a three inch thick stack of pieces of paper confirming different regulations and amounts of money that are going to bind us over the next number of years. My hand still hurts a bit - I think it was in all seriousness the greatest amount of handwriting I've done at once since the fourth year exams. Our lawyer was terribly apologetic for charging us more than she had quoted because of having to make calls to the bank to sort out their mistakes, but we said that we thought that she had been well worth it. She also announced that - even though this is thankfully out of our hands and not our direct problem - before we got our copies of the documents, she was going to get a new total loan amount quoted from the bank, because unsurprisingly the woman cocked that up as well.

It feels like we're once again moving on to a slightly more grown up phase of life. Especially seeing as dealing with our loan handler has prematurely aged us both about twenty years.

By the power of Christ, Satan and all their respective little wizards. We've just been told our closing costs are in excess of $7,000 because the stupid bitch at the bank forgot to put down that our loan covered the mortgage insurance. One day until closing.

I didn't even experience incompetence on this scale when going through the immigration process - I was cautious about broadcasting my feelings to the Internet where anyone can pick up on them at first, but I'm now convinced beyond doubt that she doesn't deserve to have a job, or to be protected from my reactions to her. The whole procedure was perfectly all right until she came along and she's single-handedly messed up more than most humans are capable of in their entire lifetimes. Once our loan is safe and irrevocable I'm certainly going to be naming her to any watchdog agencies that will listen, as well as hauling all our money out of the bank that has the lack of sense to employ her as soon as possible.

But hang on - this means that once we get this cleared up and the mortgage insurance back where it should be, by process of simple subtraction, we already know that our closing costs are going to be much less than we had at first anticipated. So we'll have enough money left over to spend it on some extras:

Additions to post-house-buying budget

Cost of car hire for a weekend: $100
Cost of petrol for going to Maine and back: ~$100
Cost of punching loan processor extremely hard in the face: $0
Cost of lawyer to justify actions on grounds of temporary insanity: $500 (I don't imagine this will be a particularly difficult case)