It's hard to unpack from Detroit

Sorry for the slow posting these past few weeks. Lily is now working in Detroit on Tuesdays, Wednesdays, and Thursdays! :( Our unpacking has slowed to a snail's pace. We're trying! We want to get the place all nice & ready and have everyone over for a nice dinner party... we just don't know when that will be.

A house is a pile of stuff with a lid on it

As we approach week four of unpacking (gadzooks!) , we've managed to set up a living area, dining area, and a desk area all in the main room. We still have a waaaays to go, but at least we can pretend to be normal people now.

We've hauled away over 350 gallons of trash. Most of that was packing materials, but there was a fair amount of "Why do we have 8 half-used bottles of Elmer's glue?"


We've also created The Outbox, (which has grown to 12 boxes) of things to sell/donate/give, or failing that, pitch. Everything from coffee mugs to an entire Playstation2 ensemble. We'll inventory it soon, so if anyone needs anything... :)

It's so painful to think we moved all that stuff only to get rid of it. But alas... we didn't have time to weed through it before our Honeymoon. So it went from our old place, into the truck, into storage, into the truck, to my parents basement in NJ, back into the truck, then here.

Water you waiting for

Overnight guest, ready to shower:
"Sean, you're hot water takes a LONG time to heat up. I've been running it for like 5 minutes..."

Sean, not looking up from his computer:
"Oh, the [H] and [C] knobs are reversed."

Guest:
"Of course they are." (Wanders back into the bathroom.)

- - -

We don't have water today (what the heck?) but I'm happy to say I finally spent the quite literally 30 seconds it takes to switch the knobs to their correct spigots.

"Hello, unit 9E ? Unit 8E is wet."

I love when mantinence says your A/C is leaking. Into your neighbors unit. Through the brick façade of the building.

Scarey sounding, but the building mantinence guys took out our A/C (pictured.. weird that you can see right out!) and were able to fix it in a few minutes. (For free!) Good thing too; we found out that a replacement unit costs $4000! (Titanium plated, no doubt.)

We won't get started on how bad our A/C is to begin with. Chugging $325 last month in electricity, you'd think it would cool the place.

Tea time

The ardourous task of unpacking continues. Unpacking in Manhattan is a lot harder than unpacking anywhere else... we empty a box, but then there's nowhere to put the stuff, so we're at a standstill.

We were trying to decide what the next step should be, and our eyes landed on six boxes of fine china. That's a whole stack along the wall! So we decided to have an "easy" night and unwrap it all.

Unpacking the fine china was the most fun we've had unpacking. First, there was all the bubble wrap -- ooo, it was such a struggle between opening a box or spending 5 minutes popping bubbles. Some boxes had both types, the big bubbles and small bubbles, so we could go back and forth.

We haven't seen our china since months before the wedding, when we first picked it out. It's a great feeling when you see something you haven't seen in 2 years and you still really love it. We love it! And in some cases, it was the first time we'd seen the item! (Sure, we'd seen the plates and cups, the usual setting they display in the stores...) But when we unwrapped the butter dish and the casserole dish - they were sooo cute!



And then we unwraped the gravy boat -- Sean and I were both like "Oh my gosh! A gravy boat - we've never owned a gravy boat before!!!" With each thing we unwrapped, we had to spend at least a few minutes studying them (and playing with them!)

Now I'm totally ready to have a dinner party - only if we can unearth the dining table and chairs :)

We can sit on the couch

After a month of having an air mattress for our bed, couch, and dining chair... having an actual couch is the most luxurious thing in the world.

(A week and a half ago, we were so desperate to sit in an actual seat that we went to a Starbucks just so we can sit in their cushy chairs.)