We Live Here!

We moved in last week and we’ve been unpacking and working on getting things clean. We’ve got more stuff than livable rooms just yet, including all of the kitchen stuff that is boxed until there is a kitchen to put stuff into.

Not having a real kitchen is getting annoying. It has been hard to eat healthy at all — a lot of sandwhiches and granola bars and things that can be microwaved. We took another trip to IKEA this past week to order the cabinets that we’ll need. That’ll all be delivered on Nov 1 and we’ll then spend the next 6 months putting it all together… Before then, though, we’ve got to finish the kitchen walls and put the floor tile down.

We also had our the security system installed this week. This has been comforting, as our house isn’t in the most stable of neighborhoods. If a window/door gets broken/opened while the system is on then all sonic hell breaks loose 60 seconds later and the police are summoned. One of the cool details is that the parts are all wireless — there was no need to run stuff through the walls. We haven’t false alrmed yet.

We also had the furnaces (of which we have 2 from when this was a duplex) cleaned, which became more of a job than we’d anticipated. They’d been run for years (maybe never?) with no filters and made a horrible stink we fired them up the first time. It is going to be a cold winter around here…

We’d been kind of afraid of the attic since we’d been working on the place. We were more than a little afraid that the pigeons that live in roof had filled the attic with years of guano and bones, or that there would be swarms of rabit bats, or maybe just that maybe we’d find a body or something. We decided that we needed to know what was going on up there, though, once we moved in. (and yes, it was incredibly irresponsible to have not looked up there a long time ago. Still though…). Anyway — we put a ladder up and opened the little the hatch only to find nothing more interesting than a slightly dusty crawl space. What a relief!

And today the city came by and cleared the yard of the house next door. This is a house that has been vacant for at least a year, maybe much much longer. It is in a state of suspended restoration and slowly falling back to pieces. The yard had gotten completely wild and was a total eyesore, but no longer. Now our yard is back to being the gnarliest on the block ($%*! honeysuckle!).