DIY Coffee Table Trays

After buying ottomans for our Sunroom in our new house, I needed trays to put on top of them. The room is black and lime green with terra cotta accents. I had some wood unfinished trays that I purchased at a craft store years ago and decided to use them. I painted the trays with a lime green acrylic paint. Three coats. Then sprayed the painted trays with an acrylic clear coat to protect the paint. Our youngest son played travel hockey for years growing up and I saved all the hotel door keys along with keys from vacations. I picked out the keys I liked the best by how they looked and where they were from, then hot glued them to the bottom of the tray. They are functional and a great conversation piece.

Amusing Bug

Moving Disaster
Well it has been a while since my last post.  We have hit a total disaster with the sell of our house. Between my last few weeks at work and the buyers wanting to be released from the contract, two weeks before closing, I have been a little distracted. After my meeting with our attorney tomorrow, I will come back and post the whole sad, stressful story. Wish me luck!

Gigi

The Process of Moving

    OK, so we are moving from the Hoosier state to the Common Wealth of Virginia. We have three and a half more weeks in our current home and four weeks until we are in our new home. I decided that I will start my blog talking about the process we are going through to get from one place to the other.
   I have just a few more weeks of work and four more days with middle school students in the building.  I am a school Secretary, or Admin, or what ever the politically correct term is. These last four days will be the busiest of the year, which is good because it will keep my mind off the whole moving thing.
   I just moved our son home from college and he will stay with me until the weekend before the move.  In June we are having a family moving week. My husband and I are going from Indy to Virginia, my youngest son just got home from St Louis and is moving to an apartment in Indy, and our oldest son is moving from Boston to Tucson. The only "stable" person in the family is our daughter in Dallas.

  The Indy House
       All the steps are complete and we are just waiting on the appraisal to come in.  Am I the only one that thinks that this is a racket? This guy comes in the house, walks around and will come back with an appraisal of a few thousand dollars over the sell price.  I will talk more about this under the Virgina house.
     This week I will start taking pictures down and getting some of the paper work done for the moving company.  They have a list you have to fill out listing your most expensive items that need to be moved. Then they take the list and give it to the driver of the truck, so he can make sure they are not damaged, because under his contract he will pay part of any repairs or replacements. Great motivator, right?

The Virginia House
     This is a whole other story.  We are working with a very resistant owner (real estate group) who does not want to do anything to fix problems with the house.  The latest is the HOA list of "must fix" items.  After a threat of us walking out on the deal unless the items are fixed, they are now scrambling to get everything done by the deadline we set. STRESSFUL!!!!!
     This house had the appraised value came back at $10k over the sell price and they used comps that were all $100k to $200k over the sale price. I just don't get it.
      We have a list of items we need to get done in the house before we move in, so that means we may have to store our stuff for a week before we move in. This can be tricky. The idea is to have them hold it in the truck for the week, instead of pulling everything off the truck, put it in storage and then load it back up to deliver.  This is more expensive and you have more of a chance of things getting damaged. I bet the driver would prefer the hold in the truck option.

I will not get into the nightmare of moving cars! That is my husband's story.

Time to get busy! 

Gigi