Apt #31 part II

I know the anticipation has been killing all my faithful readers and I just got my internet turned back on, so here it is. Drum roll please!We're going on week two in our new apartment now. Yay! We've had some minor glitches, but so far so good. The move went well; we ordered a pizza, propped open the doors of #32 and #31 and made the many arm-load trips into the new place. And just in case there is any confusion, we LITERALLY moved next door. Please see the visual aid I have prepared for anyone who may not understand what I mean by next door.

I deep cleaned the fridge in the new place which had some black dog hairs stuck inside the fridge door. eww. They let their dog look around in the fridge? Laina scrubbed out the kitchen cabinets and we each cleaned our new rooms. While cleaning her room, she discovered massive amounts of dustbunnies residing in her radiator. This set her off into a focused cleaning mode in which she began poking and prodding into her radiator using chopsticks, our dustbuster and salad tongs to remove the dust clumps. I peeked in the room to find her playing her own solitary game of Operation on a quest to remove all dustbunnies before hitting the metal edges.

In the end, our super removed the radiator from her room entirely which gave her 5 more inches to her room and wasted her long and thoughtful dust extraction efforts. Just to be sure she was safe from a future "water attack," I assisted her in stuffing the exposed pipe with papertowels and wrapping Saran wrap around it several times. No floods here.

Laina went to Ikea over the weekend and thankfully bought some furniture. Coming from such a tiny apartment to a more normal sized one, it is pretty empty. No table, no couch, no TV stand. Laina bought a kitchen table and a TV stand this weekend among the other gadgets from Ikea that you just can't help but toss into your blue and yellow bag.

We carried the stuff up our 6 flights of stairs and then got to work putting the furniture together. This was no easy feat. I realized how bad my screwdrivers are, how bad Ikea's instruction manuals are, and how Ikea furniture has to be done on a buddy system. While Laina was working on putting together the TV stand, her instructions were only this:

A hand screwing in a screw and then twisting the table leg onto it. She began screwing in the screw with her bare hand like the picture shows. She said it was hurting so I tossed her an oven mit. I was busy with the kitchen table at the time, but turned to look at her and she is now screwing in the screw with her oven mitted hand cursing at Ikea for the horrible instructions and terrible hole placement causing our furniture to be flawed. Gotta love what girls use as tools to get things done around the house. Oven mits, chopsticks, salad tongs and saran wrap.

Slowly but surely it is coming together. We may be watching TV while sitting on folding chairs but it won't be like that forever. Hopefully. Our most difficult task is probably the kitchen. This is a picture of how it looked when we first moved in.

So much white I feel like there should be a blood pressure machine mounted to the wall. The drawers seem like they should be filled with syringes and cotton balls. My arm hurts in flu shot anticipation.

There is still a lot of white in my "after" pic, but we have added a few things and its beginning to look a bit better and less like a hospital.

Please see the beautiful exposed brick, my very chic and lovely cactus and the super cute red cushioned chairs. And yes, obviously I realize this is not the same view as above and that's because those clinical cabinets unfortunately still look like that. We're toying around with some ideas: contact paper, new handles, etc. We're open to suggestions.

I'm very enthusiastic about this move and excited about my new home. There will definitely be more to come once we get some more furniture and more stories of our silly girly household tool choices.