Hicks House

From Builder Basic to Beautiful


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A Proud Patio

One of the best parts of this house and reasons we chose to purchase it was for the large 12’x20′ deck off the back.  Having never had such an expansive outdoor area, we were excited at the prospect of cookouts and the ability to entertain outside.

The patio furniture we actually purchased before we moved in, since we learned during one of our “browsing sessions” in the store that the patio furniture we liked was selling like hotcakes and not being reordered.  Apparently patio furniture season, is at the very beginning of spring and is over by summer.  I will never understand retail seasons.

The table we had our eye on was already completely sold out and out of stock, but we were able to find a similar one at Target and purchased the chairs from Home Depot.  Piece-mailing our own patio set to resemble the one no longer available.

Assembly was actually pretty easy as the table came assembled minus screwing on the legs.

attaching the legs

attaching the legs

Once the legs were screwed on we just had to flip it over and place the tiles on top.  The four non-swivel chairs came fully assembled in the box and the swivel chars just had to be snapped into the swivel mechanism.

can you believe there are fully assembled chairs in there?!

can you believe there are fully assembled chairs in there?!

Chloe provided moral support

Chloe provided moral support

whose coming over for a cookout?

whose coming over for a cookout?


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The Move In

So we’ve been officially sleeping in our new house for a little over a week now.  I unfortunately didn’t get any pictures of the big move, because it was just to hectic a day.  Thankfully we have some great friends who came to help, moves go so much faster with 4 men doing the heavy lifting.  Seriously we couldn’t have done it without them, I am a weakling – I have trouble carrying my purse sometimes…(which is mostly my fault since I insist on having a gigantic purse that I then fill to the brim).

We’re slowly getting settled in, thanks to my mom’s help and great advice we set up and made our bed pretty much first thing so that we had somewhere to crash.  The house is still covered in tons and tons of boxes as we try and figure out the absolute best way to organize everything.  In the meantime it’s kind of like camping, with a real roof and bed.  As with everything, the move wasn’t completely without incident my dresser suffered a big scratch right across the top of it 😦 hopefully it will be able to be fixed, we bought furniture crayons and markers to touch up the scratch and help blend it in.  That project will probably warrant its own post, once I get around to it.

Perhaps the biggest mishap came after everyone left.  Since its a brand new house, it didn’t come with some of things we normally take for granted like shower curtain rods.  As the big move was a Sunday and we both had to work the next day, installing a rod Sunday night was a non-question it HAD to be done.  We went off to the big Orange store and bought one of those nice curved rods that gives you a bit more room in the shower and Ken got to work installing it.  Three of the four screws went in and then disaster struck…a screw broke in half with half buried completely inside the wall with no possibility of removal.  A lot of 4-letter words were said but being the problem solver he is, he got the job done.

Meanwhile, I was downstairs trying to get our breakfast and lunches for the work day squared away.  Pretty interesting task when your kitchen is a mess of boxes and you have no idea what is in them.  It wasn’t until after I dug out a pot and put eggs onto the stove to boil that I realized

1.  I had no cooking utensils to use in order to take the eggs out of the pan

2.  I had no idea where the paper towels I use to dry the eggs off were.

Begin frantic search.  I wasn’t able to find either of those two things, but what i did find was a slotted serving spoon (possibly silver – it didn’t matter at this point) and a beach towel.  I almost wish this debacle was video taped because it was most likely quite humorous from an outsiders perspective.

We still have some things at the condo and are taking trips in the cars.  Luckily Ken is like the Master Tetris Packer – expert level.  This is one load in his Jeep:

Looking in the size door of the back seat

Looking in the size door of the back seat

Looking in from the trunk

Looking in from the trunk

This amount of stuff would have probably taken me three trips.  I’m looking forward to sharing pics of our new place, but it needs to be slightly less box infested first, so please be patient.