Our "new" couch!

I'm not sure whether this qualifies as news, but we found a couch and carried it in through the gate two days ago. And it only took 14 hours of thrift storing and writing/calling 7 different Craigslist postings to find it! Plus two trips to Vancouver - one to see it and one with a rented van to bring it home. Good thing we're not missing any work to do this.

On the bright side, we apparently surpassed our friend Tim's expectations - he was doubtful that we would find a clean, attractive couch within the week in our (admittedly low) price range. But we did! 6 months old, clean as can be and nice-smelling, from a pleasant, young church-going couple. (Oren asked if they smoked or had cats. The guy responded no, but he did go to church twice a week.) Good thing, as that was our next question.

So now we have a living room; as you can see, we are quite happy about it.

Closer to the finish line - a mini tour

Good morning!

First, the view out the bedroom window - this is what I see when I first wake up in the morning and pull open the hotel-style shades. Not a bad sight, especially on these lovely sunny days we've been having.

After our housewarming party - which started exactly 20 minutes after we had finally put all our tools under the kitchen counters and the rest of our moving boxes into our new 'closet' - the place finally feels like home. Which means it's time for a photo tour!

We at last have a functioning 'dining room' (i.e. corner) - with thanks again to Diana for her original welcome gift of chairs and table. (The tiny piece of gray rug in the picture is at the foot of our front door.)


The dividers are up, too. After a desperately boring retail saga, I finally found curtains in Gresham (drawn at night for blocking light from the kitchen window, to keep heating costs down, and eventually for giving guests the illusion of privacy). We're not 100% sold on the stairwell screen yet, although it's currently functioning as an excellent Etcetera Closet.


And below is our new desk: 2 file cabinets from the ReBuild store ($15 each) and a hollow-core door from the Dollar Doors section of the same place ($1). It made us feel good to walk through IKEA the other day and see some desks we might have considered... for waaay more that 31 bucks.


One half of the bedroom is finished - but the closet is still a jumble of dresser, boxes, and a borrowed stand for hanging clothes. We've hit a bit of a pause this week (partly on purpose - O had an interview and an A&P exam to prepare for) but as soon as we decide on some shelves it should all go up and in pretty easily. In the meantime, I'm still living out of two laundry baskets - one for clean and one for dirty clothes.


And no pictures of the living room yet. It's still just a rug, a coffee table and two camping chairs. The thrift store search for a couch hasn't begun in earnest yet. You'll see it when we find one!

A place to sleep

Finally, a bed! We finished and moved it last weekend, which involved several steps: taking it out of our wonderful friends Tim & Laura's garage (where Oren had put it together); walking it, casket-style, 10 blocks to our own house (I got booted from that chore when my shoulder didn't quite reach the bed as we walked); then into our newly green bedroom for the finishing touches. And now we have a place to snooze plus room for storage. Next post: final pictures! Curtains, shelving, closets, oh my.

Finished shelves

Here they are - the final product!

Unit Progress - Kitchen

We're slowly but surely moving in! Yesterday's project was kitchen shelving. We stopped in to five or six grocery stores asking for old wine crates - but it turns out most wine companies have switched to cardboard, so the crates are in short supply. At our last stop, a man standing in the wine section overheard our question, and offered us the crates he had in his garage! So he dropped them off and we picked them up. A few screws (and plenty of percussing the walls checking for studs) later, voila! Kitchen shelves. We'll put up the final picture tomorrow.










Ahh, the clutter of moving all your belongings from one house to another. Aye.