Yesterday I made my third trip to the fiver in NH. Jett made her second. The dogs made their first. Yes, we introduced the pups to the fiver. Grace took to it like she owned it and even decided that the floor of the closet was a good place to curl up while we cleaned the place. Cha-Cha was more hesitant and seems to have not yet decided whether he likes it. But the good news is that both made it up and down the metal stairs without assistance, which will reduce the pressure on me to build a staircase or ramp. Even Jett seems to be relatively comfortable with getting in an out. She likes the big handle at the edge of the door that she can hang onto as she navigates the steps.
She is less enamored with the screen door. It has a little sliding plexiglass door at the handle that has to be slid back to open from the inside, but is difficult to close again once outside. I suspect that we will learn to close it before exiting.
What did we accomplish yesterday? Besides cleaning the place and introducing the dogs to our new home, we also:
- Set up (and tore down) the screen room. It is larger than I expected – 10 x 10 – and in good shape. It is somewhat tricky to assemble, but, like most things, I will get better at it with practice.
- Set up the cable box. We now have DirecTV in all three rooms. I discovered (and this really shouldn’t have been a surprise), but we can tune just one channel at a time. So we can watch the same program in any room. And to change the channel in the living room I need to go into the bedroom. Not ideal, but tolerable. We expect that the kids will mostly watch DVDs and we expect to have DVD capability in all 3 rooms.
- Weighed the contents of the basement. We are trying to keep a running tally of all the cargo that will be carried and the first step was to compute the weight of the “extras” that came with the unit – screen house, levelers, etc. Not much cargo yet – maybe 100lbs total so far.
Things we haven’t done yet: sleep in the bed, cook any meals, try the freezer, take a shower, empty the holding tanks for the second bath. And we haven’t heard back yet from Ron about the platform. Those will all be things on the agenda for next weekend.
We haven’t had much fun yet, either. But we will.