Ah yes, another year, another rental. This time, however, we hope to stay put for awhile! We ended up moving 1 week sooner than planned, which felt a bit rushed while packing but has given us both a much-needed change of environment. My moving and packing planning paid off! I didn't stress at all until the Friday night before "moving day," on which day I realized, "Oh. We're moving tomorrow and I haven't packed up the kitchen."
The kitchen! My most-used, most productive room in the home! It was painful to take things out of their organized places, to dump out drawers of carefully-sorted cutlery and utensils into indiscriminate boxes, to wrap up and stack piles of bowls and glasses in such a way that they will be useless for days. What heartache! Well, it was a good excuse to go out for sushi! (Don't worry, I didn't eat any raw fish.)
Speaking of the baby, it's started moving around in there. It's weird. Alien invasion!
Ok, back to the home. We've assembled the furniture (oh IKEA, how we love thee) and got a lot of boxes unpacked. Of course I had to unpack the kitchen first! One of the many great features of this townhouse is a storage unit in the basement--and direct access to the basement from our unit! When viewing the unit, I thought the storage space was large, about 4'x6' from what I could tell. When we got the keys and were given our welcome tour, the property manager opened up the storage space door and turned on a light: it's enormous! It's about as big as our old bedroom, maybe even bigger. So we've moved all of our seasonal storage, sporting goods, and "to sell" items down there, out of the way.
Now the big task is using our closets, baskets, shelves, and other creative storage to put away the rest of the piles of stuff. We're resuming hosting our home group Sunday night, so if all else fails I'm chucking everything into the second bedroom. Once things get together, I hope to have some nice pictures.
Our new apartment is a 1930's townhouse made of brick and stucco with about twenty units facing two small courtyards. Located just south of Burnside Street, we are very close to downtown and the Northwest Neighborhood where we previously lived, and just a couple of blocks away from the entrance to Washington Park, which is just up the hill. Above are our crooked stairs leading from the living room to the bedrooms.
The neighborhood is a mix of taller apartment towers like the one to the right and two-storey townhouse style buildings like ours. You enter at the center and at the back the building opens up to a courtyard.
Our unit looks out onto this courtyard in the back which contains a small fountain with singing birds and little squirrels. The morning light shines through the trees into the bedroom and living room. Olive spends many hours sitting on the wide window sill, looking at the critters outside and the other cats in the windows next door.
