Catching up and settling in

Wow… it's been six weeks since my last post… how'd that happen? Clearly I've been slacking off on the blogging — time to fix that!

So, what's happened lately? Nothing much… and by nothing much, I mean a lot!

The biggest thing is that we're really, truly moved in and settled in now. Everything's unpacked except for stuff that's staying in storage, the furniture is arranged in pleasing and practical ways, pictures and artwork are all in place on the walls… it's a wonderful feeling! We put in a major push over the last couple weeks to get everything ready for the housewarming party and it was worth it. It's amazing how motivational a deadline can be, isn't it?

I think we actually surprised people with how settled in we are now — we got more than one comment about how “it looks like you've been living here for years.” (I think they meant that positively — “you've got it all figured out and made comfortable” — rather than the opposite — “jeez, you've been here for two months and already trashed the place!”…)

Anyway, I've really been struck lately by how everything in this house already has meaning for us and memories associated with it. It's a really good feeling. I'm going to post some examples now — please bear with my ramblings, or ignore them and just see some of the house pictures you've been asking for (though now that we've had the open house, a lot of you have already seen this stuff by now!):

Of course the pictures on the wall themselves have a lot of meaning — our wedding, the places we've traveled together — but the stairway itself also makes me think of how Heather spotted the opportunity that this big blank wall presented, and how we worked together to get the pictures arranged and hung aesthetically. A real team effort!

Our office/guest room/craft room is full of thoughts and memories. The bookcases from our eight-hour IKEA shopping spree. My D&D books and miniatures, both old and new. Even the successful room layout itself, which came from Heather saying thoughtfully, about a week after we moved in, “This room just isn't working! What if we switched all of the furniture around the opposite of how we have it right now?” This is a really cozy, comfortable room, exactly as it should be.

Our “Mickey's Shadow” walls make the bedroom a wonderfully tranquil place. The bed frame was a spontaneous purchase when we found a deal too good to refuse, a pleasant change from our usual modus operandi (see also, 8 hours at IKEA). The comforter on the bed was made for us by my mother from the tablecloths at our wedding rehearsal dinner.

See what I mean? Memories and good feelings everywhere I look!

House Pictures

Oh yeah, people keep requesting pictures of the house. I'm not sure how to give you any more pictures of the house. Do you know how hard it is take pictures of the inside of a house? Very tricky indeed. I end up with furniture pictures mostly and that's not very exciting. So until you let me know what it is you want to see (or come visit!) here is the front again:

Huh, yeah this is when we first bought it.. now imagine crazy overgrown hedges with weeds around them. We haven't quite made it to the outside of the house yet. We are in serious need of some hedge trimmers and a weed whacker.* Glenn at least keeps the grass at a reasonable height thanks to a cool push reel mower I found on Craig's list. (No really, he wanted a push reel mower, I didn't surprise [punish] him with it.)

The inside consists of 2 upstairs bedrooms and a bathroom. The bottom floor is the living room, kitchen, dining nook, craft/office/misc/guestroom room. All with new floors that I think we mentioned before. :) So there, now you've seen everything.

*Well that, and some motivation to get out in the July sun to do anything with them.

Home Sweet Home

Oh look it's been 3 weeks since we posted anything on here. How did that happen? I'm so in awe of people that can consistently update their blog in a witty, informative, and entertaining way. Obviously that's not us. :)

So I'm finally feeling more settled into the house. We finished putting together all of the IKEA bookshelves* and have pretty much unpacked everything as well.** We even have the massive quantity of cardboard produced from the IKEA trip out of the house and innocently placed in our ex-apartment's recycling bin. Glenn and I did a pretty good job of dividing the labor. ...He did it all and I supervised. It requires a lot of work to find the perfect place for everything, you know? :) And much rearranging of things later, I think we've done a pretty good job of making it feel like home and seem more like us than the apartment ever did. We're even eating dinner at the table instead of on the couch in front of the TV...which is a shocker.

Pasha's getting a little better about the house now. Especially since all of the evil cardboard is gone. She is still insanely afraid of the storm drains in the neighborhood but as one friend suggested, maybe she knows something we don't.

We're having an open house in a couple weeks and I'm looking forward to showing the place to friends and family. Several members of both of our family's are coming up to NC, many for the first time since we've moved to NC.

Exciting times!


*We spent 8 hours two weekends ago in IKEA. Yeah, you read that right, 8 HOURS. I'm uncertain whether to be proud of that fact or highly embarrassed. I love IKEA because of all the options and customizability of it all but at the same time I'm somewhat debilitated by it too. Ask Glenn about the time we stood in the linen dept of IKEA for 2 hours. Yeah, and he still married me.

**Except for the craft closet, its a giant mess, full of boxes and anything else we don't know where to put. But that's what the craft closet is supposed to look like right??

P.S Comments are turned on now, finally. In case anyone is interested in leaving any bits of wisdom or thoughts for us. Thank you.

Hardwood floors are hard

Weew its been a crazy couple of weeks! Glenn and I enjoyed our long 3 day weekend just catching our breath after the whirlwind of activity since we closed on the house. Even though we're both still having trouble remembering to drive to the house and NOT the apartment, it's already feeling more like home than our previous apartments :-)

So since the last post.. after we had the carpets removed we began the leveling process. That was tricky involving lots of roofing felt and "high-tech" analysis with a long straight edge. Luckily, I had my husband, the expert leveler around to do the job.

Humm this is definitely taking longer than the ripping-out-carpet part...

Then we brought in friends to help with putting down the bamboo. This went pretty well and only took the majority of 2 days...

Looking good!

Awww so pretty! (Other 2 rooms not shown but just as pretty)

So that was that. Well not really. We ended up taking half the boards back up the following weekend to recut them around the door molding (with help from my parents who came into town to help us settle thinking that we had already completed the floors. Ha, tricked um!) due to some oversight on our part the first time around. And we've had to redo the quarter round twice, redo the caulking job, and repaint the molding. But you know, it was all part of the plan! Here we are 3 weekends later and we're almost done (with that).

Thanks everyone for all of your help with this. We'd have many many many more weeks left of working to get this done otherwise!

Adapting to a change of scene

As we were getting ready to make our move, one area of concern for us was how the animals would adapt to the change of environment. We expected that Pasha would adapt fairly quickly but Zeta would take quite a while to get used to a different household, but so far, it seems to be exactly the opposite.

We brought Zeta to the house the night before we moved, and she was seriously unhappy - she climbed inside her litterbox and hid there, and when we came over the next morning she gave no indication of having budged even an inch overnight. However, ever since we moved all of our stuff in (even with most of it still in boxes) she has warmed up and seems now to feel right at home - perhaps the familiar smells were all she needed? She's even more obsessed about getting to go outside than she was at the apartment (we actually lost her under the back deck for a few hours when she sneaked out once, but she came back out of her own accord) but other than that, seems to be the same silly cat as always.

Pasha, on the other hand, seems to still be out of sorts. She had some major stress-induced digestive upsets (vomiting, diarrhea, bloody stool) during the first week after the move, although with some veterinary help that now seems to be under control. Furthermore, although she loves the fenced back yard, and generally is content wandering around the house, she's become very skittish - any unexpected noise we make causes her to jump, and she seems to have developed a phobia of holes in the ground (such as the AC vents in our floor, and the storm drains about our neighborhood). There must be some use to this behavior - instead of a drug-sniffing dog, we have a hole-avoiding dog. If you're not sure where the holes in the ground might be, just take Pasha for a walk and see where she flees from in terror. Problem solved!

But seriously, it's sad to see her like this - hopefully she'll get over the skittishness once she gets more acclimated to her new home. Poor dog!

Just a quick note

So much to write about, so little time... updates about our house, our move, our dog, our cars, and so forth will have to wait until we find time to write about them, but for now, here's just a quick little note, an example of one of the reasons I love Heather so much.

The other day, she was at home, feeling bored and a little down, so she went shopping online... and bought us a Dremel tool. How cool is that?

Moving Day

This morning the movers are supposed to come and pick up all of our stuff and move it to our house. It's definitely been a long time coming.. and yet, of course, we still had a ton to get done last night. It was a LATE night and EARLY morning today. We are so glad we decided to pay someone to move our stuff! We have more than 2 people's fair share of stuff!!

We're off to take Pasha to Camp Bow Wow so she doesn't have to deal with the stress of the move, and Zeta is already tucked away at the new house.

Goodbye internet, it may be a while before I see you again!