Home.

Despite the million items still on my to-do list for this house, everything from remodeling the kitchen to doing something about that backyard, it is incredibly soothing to come home everyday. We passed our final inspection on our pre-move-in remodel last Tuesday. At the same time, we got a thumbs up on the pre-walkthrough inspection at the apartment. I found claimants for all the remaining items we needed to get rid off. (Here's to hoping they all show up as promised.) And now I'm ready to settle in and relax for a while.

We're finally cooking again. I'm attempting to learn to use our adorable old gas stove that has none of the modern safety features (i.e., I'm doing my best to not blow up the house). We are both loving having the laundry be so convenient.

Pictures soon.

All moved in

With a little help last weekend, we got the last few pieces of our furniture into the house, leaving a pile of items that didn't quite make the cut back at the apartment. We went out Sunday and picked up a new TV stand and couch.

I'd long wanted the IKEA Liatorp sideboard as my new TV stand. However, since about last August (right around the time we bought the house), the sideboard had been continually oversold. Then sometime around the end of the year, it had, *gasp*, disappeared from the website and the showroom floor. I went to the inter-web (what else?) to try to find more information and there were whispers here and there about it being discontinued due to production quality problems. Imagine my horror at finding that out! I, being my obsessive-compulsive self, immediately set up a Google Alert to find out more. It wasn't entirely successful as it just picked up lots of craigslist and eBay ads of people trying to sell theirs. (Most of the ads were based in Canada or I very well may have jumped on them.) Now imagine my surprise and joy that as I'm walking through IKEA last weekend and see my beloved sideboard and find several in-stock in the warehouse! I was completely over the moon. (As of this morning, the US IKEA website still doesn't pull up the sideboard.)

The couch I picked out was a jigsaw of cushions with a long chaise at one end so I can lay back and enjoy my TV shows without the picture being sideways. The first IKEA we went to no longer stocked it so we were shuttled off to the much larger IKEA in Emeryville. The lady who helped us went into a long schpiel about how we should bring a lot of friends over, open a bottle of wine, and be ready to settle into a long night of work to put the couch together and how the cushions were particularly finicky so just be patient. I, unimpressed, thought "*Scoff*.  Do you know how many hours of assembly-required I've logged and how many pieces of furniture I've had to put together, take apart, and put back together?"

When we got down to the warehouse, I realized I had completely underestimated the size of the couch. It came in two packages, about 100 lbs. each. They were just a bit too long to be able to close the gate on the truck. They were just a bit too wide to slip into the bed side by side. So they had to be stacked into the bed, sticking up over the cab by several inches, and hauled down the freeway at 70 miles an hour for 30 minutes. I was more than a little concerned on the way home, praying that they didn't fly out and cause a catastrophe on the freeway. It didn't help that the cling wrap the package was wrapped in flapped conspicuously the whole way home.

And when we got home to put it together, I realized I had somewhat underestimated the difficulty of putting a fitted L-shaped couch cover onto an overstuffed cushion. It really did require at least two people. Having slick hardwood floors does not help. You really must follow the instructions closely on which end you put in the cover first. Wine also would not have helped because we would have just had two drunk people dancing with a couch cushion instead, which, while an entertaining image, would not have accomplished anything.

On Dancer, On Prancer, Woah Travis

I walked in the door from work last night and, where my futon used to be, I could only see carpet. Piled up in various corners of the room were the pieces of my futon: a pile of cushions over here, the slats over there, and look, there's my armrests. Apparently, Travis had decided we wouldn't be waiting until the weekend to move the rest of our furniture. It was then that I found out his goal was to have the rest of the furniture moved by tonight (forecast for a 70% chance of rain). When I mentioned the rain, he said, "We'll figure something out." I wonder if he's planning to invent a force shield by tonight because I'm not sure you cuch weedling on my part, he agreed to purge some and select others to take to his office. During this move while we've been going over all of our possessions and selecting things to purge, I've discovered he's the second worst pack rat I know. (The honor of the worst would have to go to my dad.  Sorry Dad but it's true.) It's a wonder we get along at all.

We also made something of an impulse buy. After dragging my old 27" CRT TV down the stairs from our second floor apartment, into my car, and across town. Travis and I realized that now was probably a good time to finally buy those flat screen TVs we'd been meaning to upgrade to. So this happened.

I'm still kicking myself for not having this realization before we dragged the TV to the house. I sure hope we made that Fry's employee's day though.

I've also learned during this move that I'm extremely allergic to dust/we really must dust more. Since last weekend, I've been a walking sneezing fit. Besides the usual itchy eyes, runny, stuffy nose.

A little haven for clothes

		Thanks to the Container Store's elfa collection, I got to custom design the racks in my closet to use the space how I best thought it would work with my clothes.
The lights are from IKEA (Cessium). The shelves double up for a bit more hanging space but are single in the back from long dresses and the like.
		A place for all my shoes! These puppies should hold 18 pairs of heels. I figure I can probably slip flats and sandals underneath to really use the space.
In my opinion, this is a work of organization art. It makes me feel warm and fuzzy inside.

Time for some moving and grooving

Last weekend, we handed in our 30-day intent to vacate notice to our apartment management. So we finally have a deadline for moving. I've been busy boxing up the apartment though by the looks of it, you wouldn't know I'd done anything. It just continues to amaze me how much crap two people accumulate.

I've made one trip to donate clothes I've purged. I managed to sell some old puzzles and small games in about 10 minutes (something I've been bugging Travis to do for about 2 months.) And I set up our phone service to be swapped over to the new place. Now it's onto more boxing and getting rid of some book shelves, an old VCR, and a smorgasbord collection of VHS tapes.

Over at the house, we had a cleaning spree as well. We packed the car so tight for our (hopefully) last trip to the dump that I had to sit with this bag of empty paint cans in my lap just to fit. We surpassed the weight minimum with a total load of 0.54 tons (a little over 1000 pounds). That's a lot of trash! And we finally reclaimed the space in the garage so our cars might fit.  Now if only I had the driving skills to get the car into the garage.