It’s been a somewhat chaotic and stressful month at chez us. Our new car arrived and we had to go pick it up. Despite all the promises of “It won’t be a problem that you’re away, we can work around that”, when the car we’d ordered arrived they wanted money immediately or threatened to sell it to someone else with no likelihood of another one with that trim/colour option being obtainable.
This is because we wanted a Kia Niro EV which, as we know, is made of unobtainium. Apparently people called from Texas offering to buy it when it appeared on the stock list.
And if we are paying a frankly terrifying amount of money for a car, it damn well better be the colour/option list we want.
Mind you, it was a little unclear exactly what we were getting because the dealer had no clue exactly what the spec would be on the “launch edition”, but at any rate, it arrived and is very shiny.
The down side of that is that, of course, we had to sell our much loved Rav4EV. We’d both become weirdly attached to Ravtastic, with the excellent reliability, comfort and somehow personable and friendly nature of the car. Part of it is no doubt, as Kathryn pointed out, that she (Ravtastic) had been around through a bunch of hyperstressful experiences.
She’d taken us out to our house building project where we failed to get a permit and had to do battle with Thurston county. She’s carried us through 2 years of crazy busy stuff in building the house; ferrying tons of tools and bits. She’s been our car through my burnout and depression when teaching. And let’s be honest, she was our first big purchase in this country.
At any rate, I’ve never been so sad to sell a car. We both thanked her for being so good to us, then sent her on her way to Michigan!
Of course getting through the selling process has been a mare, the person buying her wanted to finance her and – well, although it went fine it has taken us right up to vacation time. Basically everything we said needs to happen before our vacation has. But by a matter of days. Ravtastic left yesterday, our plasters got shifted by a week, meaning that the first coat of plaster only went up on our house this week too.
That was cool, though. Our plasterer teaches plastering and since this was the scratch coat (and so while the thickness needs to be fairly consistent, the final finish on this coat is rough), we got to do some of the application. We can still point to the walls and say it’s us.
Interestingly, to help with bonding to the drywall/plasterboard, they added thinset (tile adhesive) to the scratch coat. That won’t be the case for the top coats, so I’m curious to see how that differs. I’m also hoping that we can get good enough that we can apply some of the topcoat. I have done a little with regular old plaster (over lath and on brick) but not with lime and definitely not quickly.
The amount of water in the house is bloody terrifying though. We checked in and our plasterer confirmed that we could keep our (borrowed) dehumidifier running. But at the end of the first coat it was saying 80% relative humidity and the floors had water soaking in. Since the only direction of exit is up, in this case, the dehumidifier is working overtime.
Then we have the ceilings. We could’t afford to get the ceilings lime plastered, so they are coming around to spray them with gypsum based drywall stuff and then go for a smooth finish. That’s all arranged, but it’s pretty much antithetical to our policies to let people work on the house when we aren’t here. It’s the only way it can happen in a reasonable timeframe though, because all the builders around here are crazily busy. Our job is small enough that they can just ‘fit it in’, but finding someone with a gap that works has been tough.
Of course, because it’s us, our holiday also falls when we have a bunch of bills and payments due, and because we’ve been cramming on the housework (it needed a coat of paint over the entire inside before the plaster could go up), we’ve neglected our adulting meaning this week while we’ve been getting the car sold, and plastering the house, and I’m working a lot, and Kathryn has a lot of work stuff on, is the one where we need to get adulting done. It does mean some things have got left, somewhat, to the lat minute. Neither of us are packed for the holiday. There’s a long list of payments and bills to sort before we go.
I’m just hoping we can forget about then when we leave enough to really enjoy being nicely isolated.
