Peanuts

As it turns out, styrofoam peanuts, like squirrels, will find their way into anything with an opening. Who knew?

Kitchen

Here I took these lovely ‘after’ pictures of the kitchen, only to discover that I forgot to take ‘before’ pictures! Oh well, you’ll have to use your imagination:

I spent this morning putting the pulls and handles on the cabinets. It’s really quite amazing how a little thing like that can change the whole look and feel of the kitchen. Note the three pictures on the wall in this photo: the two on the left are woodcuts that were purchased at Grand Rapid’s festival in 2000 (I think). The one on the right is an original photograph by our friend Denise!

This island is a new addition to the kitchen. We bought it from the local Boscovs for something like $150 less than the original price! It was also the inspiration for the pulls I installed this morning.

I love my new fridge!

I couldn’t figure out where to put the hanging pot rack. This is a fairly good solution, but it still isn’t perfect.

D'Oh

So I decided to clean out the nasty-ass dishwasher last night. Or, more specifically, I had to clean out the dishwasher last night ‘cause Tara wouldn’t touch it in its current condition and the dishes were really starting to pile up. So I scrubbed it w/ softscrub and ran it once. Then, I got the brilliant idea to run it again, but this time with regular old dish soap. This was the result:

Ok, so the new home-owner lesson of the day is: don’t use regular dish soap in the dishwasher, idiot.

Beat LA

No pictures for today - we spent the day unpacking cargo and trying desperately to turn a big pile of crap into comfortable living space. We’re almost done with the living room, where we are currently enjoying Detroit’s 5 point lead on those damn Lakers. Beat LA. Beat LA. Beat LA….

Stuff 2

Now that we’ve got the stuff, we have to unpack it. And oh boy, have we got a lot of stuff:

Did I mention that some of our boxes - including the one that contained my receiver - got wet in the back of the truck?

After loading all the crap into the upstairs master bedroom, I noticed that there was a small new crack in the living room ceiling. We were planning on reinforcing this with a column in the next few months anyway, so we ran out an purchased one of these jacks from Home Depot:

It actually took an amazing amount of time to find this floor jack in the Home Depot. We eventually were able to find a manager who knew where they were. You’d think that with all the old houses around here, they wouldn’t be able to keep these things on the shelves!

If you look very carefully, you’ll notice that I was able to discover yet another use for the Ikea IVAR shelves!

Stuff

The stuff arrived early on Saturday morning. Here are the truck, and Tara posing with our very nice movers Mike and Tony.

Mike and Tony were unbelievably helpful and conscientious, especially after the long delay we had waiting for our stuff. They even stayed a few minutes longer than necessary to help me stack the dryer on the washing machine!

They did tell us that they almost refused the shipment - we are guessing that the lengthy delay resulted from another driver’s refusal. You see, the United agent in St Louis underestimated the load by a good ton. The drivers, from what I gather, are semi-independent contractors who have to make their own ends meet. The fact that the shipment weighed a great deal more than the payment locked in by the agent’s poor estimate made our shipment very unattractive to drivers. It took some movement from on high (spurred, no doubt, by our instance that they reimburse us in advance for the hotel) to convince Mike and Tony to ship our stuff. Incidentally, Bill and Adele’s move was also underestimated, and also arrived late.

The Stuff has arrived!

Day 16 of our odyssey without stuff, and the movers have actually arrived! As I write this stuff is actually arriving in our house. Fantastic. Unfortunately, they had to re-tag everything, so we have little idea if all of our stuff has actually arrived or not. I’m sure we’ll have that vague ’something’s-missing-but-I’m-not-sure-what’ feeling for a few years, whether or not something is actually missing. But hey, look on the bright side: we have achieved comfortable bedding!

Tara Wounded!

While I was installing a curtain rod on the front door (which you can admire behind Tara in the picture below), I accidentally dropped my Philips head screwdriver onto poor Tara’s foot. Poor thing.