More Working Pics

Tim getting the porch freshened up.

 For all of you who love seeing Marshwiggles hard at work, here are some more pictures of our "in progress" getting ready for listing time.

Emmi did our high dusting. Cobwebs - begone!

Ben met Mr. Clean's Magic Eraser to try to minimize the artwork in the schoolroom.



Pip painting.



A rare photo of me in painting action.

And now we have this on the front lawn:

Picture Day

Today was picture day for our house! After all our painting, cleaning, and decluttering work the place looked great, if I may say so myself! This is our realator, Steve Dube:

Here he is taking a photo of our schoolroom. He is going to call it the "family room". The listing should be up on Monday, the sign on Tuesday, and then we should start showing the house on Wednesday. Wow!

Spray Stain Remover to Squid Skewers

It was another busy, working day at the end of a busy, working week. This morning started in the basement, which had been overhauled on Wednesday evening with a close friend, with me realizing I have 3 bottles of spray on stain remover. Now that all the like items are grouped with like I can see these things!

It has been a very humbling process getting the house ready to sell - I am finding a bunch of these little things (who needs THREE bottles of the same thing? - Someone who can't keep track of where the first two went!) which tell me I have not been paying enough attention to parts of the home. It has been humbling to generate boxes and boxes of stuff that is going to Goodwill or different friend's garage sales, and also to have to buy garbage tags (and they just put the price up here as of May 1st!). However it has been a good process - therapeutic in some ways, to have to go through the house room by room and really evaluate everything in it. And I realize that I haven't finished this process, we've just done the things that are visible - there are drawers and boxes that will need sorting, which will of necessity happen when we actually move.

It was a productive week and day - the porch is back together and I've started painting it. Tim and Ben put on the final touch carpentry-wise, the quarter-round at the base of the walls. Emily did a mighty work for me in the Tupperware cupboard ("Mummy! You don't need all this Tupperware!" - maybe we have a natural organizer in the household?) and Pip was a general go-fer. We were joined by my mother and father who have put our front garden in shape. In fact, the day was so busy I didn't have a chance to take any pictures!

To celebrate all this work my parents took us out to dinner at an all-you-can-eat sushi restaurant, which is where I encountered a little squid, eyes and all, at the end of a squid skewer. Ben said "Mummy! There are his eyes!". And down the hatch he went! I'm sure I'll sleep well tonight, but I wonder if the little squid will visit me in my dreams.

Hard at Work

 We are still hard at work on preparing the house. The weather was lovely this past Saturday, so we did a lot of outdoor work. David has been repairing the porch, you can see here that the floor is done, and he is just getting ready to put the bases back on the pillars (you can see the one on the left "floating"). Now the pillars are done, so the porch will pass back to me to do the painting.

The whole family was involved in our work day. Pip and Ben were taking old lattice work off the front of the porch:

 Tim got to use a drill for the first time! He put up three curtain rods inside the house, and then helped David and I take down the storm windows and put up a lot of the shutters.

Emily did work indoors as well as out. Here she is packing DVDs and listing on the computer which DVDs are in which box, so when we want to watch the Muppet Show (for example), we know which box to look in!

Moving - In Process

We are getting there! Parts of the house are in chaos (we like to think an organized chaos), but parts of it are starting to look really good. Things are getting checked off of the list of things to do before listing - so far we have:

- painting the shutters - check

- decluttering upstairs - check

- cleaning upstairs carpet - check

- painting upstairs hallways - check

Lots still to come! This week's focus is the downstairs - hopefully next Saturday I can take some more enticing pictures of our home!!

In between we are still celebrating birthdays, visiting friends, coaching mathletes (for a math contest), taking music lessons, eating, sleeping and making lots of laundy; and are trying to keep making time for one another and for God. Busy times, but good times.

Marshwiggles on the Move - Part One of Many

Well friends, we have decided it is time. After a lot of prayer, and talk, and thinking, and researching, and more prayer, we have decided that it is time for us to move. As many of you know, David's job moved out to Burlington, and then Oakville, about 2 years ago and since then we have been pondering a move.

I think the Lord held us back for the past couple of years for a number of reasons: David's health, our family needing some more time in Niagara, some really great friendships that have really blossomed in that time, and we just didn't know where to go. But now we feel the Lord is leading us to the Kitchener Waterloo area (by which we include Guelph and Cambridge), and we think we have some good reasons to back up that decision. We have family there, and the commute to Oakville is the same as it is from Port Robinson. Our other family members in Toronto will be no farther (alas, no closer!) but more accessible on public transit! And KW also offers a lot for the older child and young person, and we hope to have several of those in our home soon!

So to our Niagara friends, we love you and will miss you, but we hope to keep in touch and get together (Stratford anyone??), and to our KW friends, we look forward to being closer to you!

In Bible Study Fellowship this year I have been learning from the study of Acts that God leads one step at a time, and asks for our obedience one step at a time. So often I want the big picture, the 10 year plan, and I am sure that Peter and Paul and the other apostles would have appreciated that too - but that's not how God works. I can think of many practical reasons why He does this, one of which is to develop our trust in Him, and another is because quite frankly, a 10 year plan might scare us too much! I am quite sure that this is the next step of obedience that God is calling us to, and so even though sometimes I feel very overwhelmed, and frightened, we are obeying. And the first step right now is to get our house ready to put on the real estate market!

I thought I would include updates of what is going on, on this blog, so if you have a particular interest in what's going on you can get your news! A lot of you have generously offered to help with "whatever we need", so I've generated a list of what your duties will be... just kidding! (Monday: declutter Marsh house, Tuesday: list Marsh house, Wednesday: conclude sucessful purchase of Marsh house....) I will be posting "help needed" days here, and if you can come and give us a hand - great! And no pressure if you can't! And if you are too far away, we covet your prayers! In fact, we covet ALL of your prayers!

NRSEF Update

Emmi's cupcakes won an Honourable Mention, and  $50 prize! We are all very proud of her!