More Photos of the New Place
Finding rugs was hard. We knew we needed them, that our living room(s) wouldn't be warm and living room-esque without them. But finding ones we both liked proved harder than we thought. Sam and I don't always see eye to eye, but when it comes to how we want things to look, we generally align nicely. Or so I thought ... Until we went to Home Depot and stood outside in a big white Rug Tent, and discovered we completely disagreed. Then we went inside Home Depot, and disagreed some more. Then to Target, disagreeing. And out to Home Goods (a half hour drive), where we nearly bought one, but ultimately, disagreed. And we came home empty-handed.
Those were rough days, when we first got in the house. Moving tries a relationship anyway. Add in the messy buying process and the month in a hotel and by the time we got in here, well, yeah, we were arguing about rugs.
Things have settled now. More or less. (We found rugs we agreed on, thanks to our friends K and E, who accompanied us to a discount place called Building 49, and helped us decide.) We still don't have enough storage space in the bathroom so we have to dig through a cardboard box to find the Q-tips, but we're happy. The cats chase each other through the kitchen, through our offices, under our bed. We cook meals together in our kitchen. We sit on the couch and watch movies. We sit at our desks in our offices and can hear the other person clicking the keys and it's pleasant.
[kitchen, sam with bowl of pasta]
[kitchen, sam washing out pasta bowl]
[tadzio in the inglenook (he's not, technically, supposed to be there.)]
[the loo. not featured: cardboard box.]
A recent scene from our life in this house: On Sunday, driving down our street, coming home from church, I spotted an item of furniture someone had put out to pasture. It looked like it could solve the bathroom cardboard box situation, so I ran in and got Sam and we carried it home, each of us gripping an end, waddling our way in our winter coats across and down the street. It was too big for the bathroom, but we think it will help our pantry storage, which is also lacking, and once I cleaned the snow off its feet, we got it settled.
Sam put on some Albert King blues music and we took down our Christmas decorations and Sam sang along, sometimes changing the words ("If we didn't have no bad catsssss, we wouldn't have no cats at allllll.") and all the while the kitties were there, circling the tree, looking up at us, wondering what on earth we were doing with their tree. We couldn't figure out how to take the (fake) tree apart, so we opted to become of those people who store their tree intact and upright in our basement storage unit. (My grandmother was one of those people, so we're in good company.) Once we had everything downstairs, we sat on the couch, sighing, Sam's arm around me, both of us staring into the renewed empty space, listening to the blues, and feeling anything but blue.
We think we like this place. We think we'll stay.
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