Housing update

Well, dear readers, a few more days and we will be in our new house! We closed yesterday on the sale of our current house and the purchase of our new house, and we will be moving everything out tomorrow and cleaning things up to hand over the keys on Friday.

There is so much I could say about the process, the people we have dealt with, and the excitement of being in a new place. We already have a list of projects and improvements for which we will be saving our lunch money. We even have our first visitor lined up for this weekend! A friend who is in town from DC for a conference stayed with us last weekend as the last visitor in our old house, and he'll be back this weekend as the first visitor in our new house.

While much of the house will still be in various stages of being unpacked and settled into, one feature will be ready for immediate use and will most likely receive a lot of attention as we relax and take breaks from the all the work in front of us. What is that feature, you ask? The Pool Table!!!

Yes, I feel like a kid in a candy store! Since high school I have dreamed of owning a pool table, and the day my residential college bought a pool table for the commons area was a giant leap for my free time (though a small step backwards for my studies)! Clearly, it is not easy to fit a pool table in to an apartment, or even a house the size of our first home, so I had to bide my time. The dream waited quietly, yearning for the day it could awaken and find enough loose change under the cushions of the sofa to become a reality. This new house, however, has a game room for which we currently have no furniture. This poor room would sit empty and alone but for the fact that the seller of the house had a pool table (a nice one, from all I can tell) up there that he did not want to go to the trouble of moving. End result? Free pool table for the Bredenbergs, and the dream lives! (Commence happy dance!)

Between the table and a treadmill we have been offered by family members, the game room will at least not be totally empty.

Unfortunately (or perhaps fortunately) I'm practical enough to realize that we won't always have the luxury of using that space for the pool table, and at some point as our family grows we will likely turn that into a bedroom or additional usable living area. For now, however, I'll bask in the warm glow from the neon beer signs and the velvet artwork involving dogs playing poker and enjoy my pool table.

Ok, ok, there are not and will never be neon signs or velvet art in there, but you get the idea. One thing that might show up at some point is one of these. Hey, a guy can dream, can't he?