We are in Athens!

Back in the middle of July we made the BIG move of all of our belongings to Athens. We decided that this would be a good idea to ease the craziness of Matt's first weeks in school. The move went well in pretty much every aspect except.....not everything fit! The U-haul was just not big enough for all of our stuff. We have quite a few belongings. I can see why people 'move away' to graduate school before they are married or commute/ do online schooling if they are already married. Moving away for just 18 months of schooling is a lot of work.  However, the masters degree Matt is obtaining is strongly set up to be hands on and active on campus. So moving to a campus was our only option. But we already had an existing 'home' with all the things that are in a 'home'... making the move back to a college town and into a smaller space even more difficult.

Our new place is really quite nice. We are just south of campus in a residential neighborhood with a nice culdesac at the top of a hill. We are living in a duplex, side by side. We have two bedrooms, our own laundry and some attic space. We really think this will be a great home for us for the next two years...

Matt has been so great in hanging pictures, hanging shelving, shampooing the carpets (more on that later), organizing the kitchen, setting up our new banking... the list goes on and on. I got myself such an amazing guy. Never stopping until the job is done. I can't be more proud of him, his schooling and the life we are putting together for ourselves down here in southern Ohio.

As for our carpets (ugh)... After spending a few nights in the new apartment we were discovering our feet to be black, yes black, on the bottoms. At first we contributed this to maybe all the moving, setting up, trips outside and so on. So the next day we tried to pay closer attention to where the dirt was coming from, hoping it was not from the carpet, knowing our landlady told us it would be cleaned prior to our move in...

Turns out... they weren't. Our feet continued to get black and our carpets were looking dirtier and dirtier as we realized they weren't clean at all :(. We even did a damp towel test on the carpet and the towel came up a nasty brown color. We obviously called our landlord and explained our frustration especially knowing that the previous tenants had a black lab and a cat. She was pleasant and offered to pay for the rental of a shampooer. So with a lot of hard work we now have clean carpets. And all along we thought they were. Just so frustrating.

Of the three places Matt has rented (this being the third) we have to admit this landlord seems really adequate and professional... so we are hoping this is not a sign of future housing issues. We believe it was just miscommunication between her and the previous tenants. Either way we don't want to discredit her just yet :)

Now that we have a pretty home and we are starting to settle in, we are excited for all that is to come with graduate school and potential jobs for me!

 Matt starting the carpet cleaning process in the kitchen/dining room. (Yes, we know it is very odd to have carpet in the kitchen. Just another reason why carpet should be cleaned, especially if food is being spilled on it. gr.) You can see the stains in the bottom of the picture. The sad part was that these were not permanent stains at all and came up quite quickly with the shampooer. Crazy.

Water being dumped out of the carpet cleaner after doing a small part of the kitchen/dining room. We did this area of the house about three times, each time the water looked like this. We believe we could have shampooed the carpet for the next week straight and it would have continued to pull water this dirty from the carpet.

Here you can see animal hair being pulled from the carpet. Prior to us shampooing the carpet had been vacuumed about 8 times (between the previous tenants cleaning before they left, the landlord vacuuming twice before we got the keys, Matt's mom and brother cleaning before we got down here with the U-haul and me vacuuming before the start of shampooing.) That's how much animal hair gets stuck deep in the carpet. I almost got sick looking at this. I love dogs, but not what they leave behind in my new home.

Our family during the move-in of 'belongings' weekend. We took a hot stroll through down town Athens and stopped for a photo op. It all started to seem more real. And now... here we are :)