As in, even my bones hurt today.
I am physically in no shape to become a partial homeowner/dweller. (I’m probably not mentally, emotionally, or financially in shape for such a life project either, but let’s just talk about my unbelievable lack of muscle structure for today, mkay?)
We closed on the house exactly two weeks ago, but had some more work we wanted done, including getting the floors stained and finished (we chose Jacobean for our light pine floors).
They’ve now gone from this:
To this:
They make me so happy I want to lick them. Primarily because the floor staining did not require any manual labor from me, but also because they look like very expensive chocolate.
This past weekend, however, my favorite wanna-be-construction-worker-boyfriend XFE and I had big plans. Very, very big plans. Like, plans that required two UPS trucks to deliver.
Yep. 16 boxes and 483 pounds worth of custom closets from EasyClosets.com for the new house. Which we then had to put together ourselves. Yikes.
In a stunning triumph for do-it-yourselfers everywhere, we did it. Well, XFE mostly did it, with some vague assistance from me. But, I now know what a “cam screw” is and I think we can all be super excited for that truly invaluable life skill. (I also learned from a very patient XFE that it’s easier to hammer something straight on rather than at an angle. Related: if you utter “uh-oh,” the proper thing to do is stop whatever activity caused that utterance and ask for help rather than continuing the “uh-oh” activity.)
So now our closets went from this:
To this:
Just kidding. They look like this:
Actually, they look full of clothes because we moved all of our hanging clothes over, along with a ton of other boxes. The good thing about moving 8 blocks away? You get to go to your new house everyday to check on it and oooh and aaaah over it. The bad thing? You get to move lots of boxes yourself because you are so impatient to move, you just can’t wait for the movers to show up on the scheduled date.
In addition to the clothes, we moved over all the kitchen items and got that set up, which is a huge relief.
Speaking of the kitchen, I also provided totally useless assistance in replacing our kitchen faucet. We had a very nice new faucet that came with the house, but when we saw this fellow at Lowe’s, we were smitten.
However, switching out this sink:
This was not easy. Maybe because we’re not plumbers? Plus we didn’t have instructions for the old sink and were doing it all wrong. The hard, frustrating way wrong, especially for XFE who was lying on his back under the sink for hours. But, eventually, with the help of the almighty Google, we finally got the old faucet off and the new one on. We’re both enamored of the cool industrial design of the final product and feel that the effort was (almost) worth it.
Since the final move is on Wednesday (two days!) and the trash pick-up is on Monday, we had to move everything to the curb that we wanted to get rid of. This included a guest room mattress and box spring (and all the empty custom closet boxes at the new house).
Funny thing about this box spring: we couldn’t get it into our current house and up the narrow stairs. The result was a hole in the wall that we had to get repaired.
So to get the bed out of the house without putting any holes in the wall, we had to saw the wood and bend it around the stairwell, which is one reason why that bed is not coming to the new house (Two-word warning for future couch surfers: Air. Mattress.)
We also got rid of a very, very large entertainment center that weighed approximately a kajillion tons. It was “liberated” from the trash Sunday evening, but even the dumpster divers had a hard time getting the unwieldy piece attached to the roof of their SUV.
We have held off from buying new living room furniture the last couple of years since we weren’t sure where we were going to be living. I’m so glad we did because the layout of our new house is completely different from our current house.
So we’ve begun looking at some new furniture options, including a new entertainment center (which will be much smaller next time around).
We’re also investigating some new coffee table options (I spilled nail polish remover all over our current one about 2 years ago. It pains me to look at it everyday, but does provide an excellent argument for paying for professional manicures). This table’s definitely in the running.
I’m pretty sure I couldn’t ruin it with nail polish remover.