I am a decorating failure

OK, maybe not a failure but I'm definitely a little slow. We went over to say hi to our neighbors earlier this evening and I had no idea what great taste they had. Their whole place is totally set up--curtains on every window, photos and artwork on the walls, accessories--and it looks fantastic. They've been in their place at least six months less than us and their place is so much more put together than ours.

And it turns out Becky is super crafty! They're having a baby in a couple of weeks and we got to take a look at their nursery. She made the artwork and the mobile in the room--they were amazing. The artwork were three large canvases, maybe 3' square, and she had freehand drawn animals onto them and painted them onto bright backgrounds. The first was a mother and baby giraffe, the second was an elephant (can't remember if that was mother and baby too), and the third was a mother and baby penguin. They were seriously awesome. And the mobile was so elaborite--lots of ribbon, painted wood squares, swirly patterns--just so, so cool! I had no idea she had such skills! I was totally impressed and jealous.

I just can't believe how far they've taken their place (they even painted literally every room in the place) and how much further behind we are. *sigh* someday we'll get there.

Blinds!!!

Hooraaaaaaay!!! Ten months after moving in we finally have real window coverings on all the windows in the house. A few weeks ago we ordered the last set of blinds we needed from Home Depot and oinstalled them over the last couple of nights. The paper blinds are finally gone!

Now to find curtains. It's never-ending....

Updated house pics

I took some new pics of the downstairs rooms in the house. There's definitely been progress, but we've still got more to do. We're in desperate need of "accessories" now--pictures, homey knick-knacks, etc. And there are no pictures of the red room because right now it's basically a holding area for the still-unpacked boxes, leftover apartment furniture, tools.... But anyway, for your viewing pleasure:

The Living Room
We still need to get a couple of armchairs for more seating in here, but this is the one room that's 90% complete. The entertainment unit is in need of some of the pretty things mentioned above to fill up the shelves, so don't mind the gaping open spaces. We're just happy that we finally found something nice to put the TV on instead of my old coffee table, and W. finally has his nightstand back instead of using it to hold the DVD player/amp/CD player, etc.

Kitchen

This room is a far cry from the 1970s avocado green kitchen we had in our last apartment before this house. The granite counters, storage space, counter space, stainless steel appliances, and lighting are all awesome. Even our kitchen table is fun--we got a counter-height table and love it.

Dining Room

Definitely a room that needs more decorating! The table is square with a hidden butterfly leaf for easy expansion when we have guests--no protecting and storing an extra table leaf under the bed for us. I swear the butterfly leaf is the best thing since sliced bread. The kitchen table above actually has a butterfly leaf as well. I got the little buffet unit from Target; it was the perfect size for the space (and priced right) but man it was a pain in the butt to put together (and I've put together a lot of DIY furniture).

Downstairs 1/2 Bathroom

Self-explanatory. Also in need of little touches.

I'll take some pictures of the upstairs rooms at some point and add those too. Thinking of doing some painting, but we'll see if I actually muster up the enthusiasm to do it ;)

So many updates...

Our S.F Trip
The bad news is that we had to postpone our planned trip to Vail this year because the friends who were going with us had some things come up and couldn't make the trip anymore. The good news is we spent a week in the bay area recently boarding with said friends in Tahoe instead (tough life, I know :P). We boarded for three days straight at Kirkwood, Heavenly, then Sierra.


We had a fantastic time. The first day at Kirkwood was a little icy, but well-groomed so it was still pretty good. That night it dumped several feet of fresh powder and continued to snow all day. For a beginner like me, it was a bit too much of a good thing as the deep powder along with the snowy conditions made it a little difficult to do any carving. In fact, we ended up hiking a good portion of the day because our friend S's board didn't have enough wax on it and even on a solid downslope she wasn't moving more than a few inches in the slightly wet snow. Between hiking back down to the shop and digging out of huge drifts all day, I got more of a workout getting out of trouble than actually boarding :P

The last day at Sierra though was epic. Just the right amount of powder, sunny conditions, relatively short lines--it was great! And I did improve my carving skills a bit, so all in all we ended the trip on a very high note.

So what do you do after spending three days straight snowboarding? Go rock climbing the next day and then play volleyball two days in a row after that, of course! :) Amazingly, our bodies held out; no injuries, no major pains. We had an absolutely fantastic time on our trip, all due to seeing and spending time with all our friends out there. Special thanks to S, R, and their dog Rocky for hosting us in their lovely home all week. Can't wait to see you all again in July when we're out for the first wedding this season!

Big Weekend Purchase #1
Since we've been back, we've been pretty busy. We've been missing a few big furniture items even after six months of (painful, tedious, boring) shopping, one of which is an entertainment unit for the TV and stereo components. Right now the nice new TV is sitting on our old coffee table and the stereo components on a $10 BB&B nightstand. This weekend though we finally decided on a wall unit that fits all our various technologies and matches the furniture we already have. Phew.... That was pretty painful. It should be here next week. Then we just need to get another chair or two for more seating and the living room will be finis!

Then there's Big Weekend Purchase #2. After even more painful shopping, today we finally got our hands on the car we've been shopping for since November. We ended up with a Certified Used 2005 Audi A4 1.8T Quattro. I kind of still can't believe it. My '98 Civic is going to my sisters so they can finally have a car and I'll be picking this baby up in a week or so. On a side note, Audi has a pretty amazing Certified program compared to the others we looked at: 2 additional years or 50,000 miles on top of the original 4 years/50,000 miles. So my '05 car has slightly more coverage than a brand new '07 would. That's pretty cool.

So now, basically, we have no money left :P Guess we'll be sitting at home enjoying our TV for entertainment for a while!

Curtains and blinds

Yay, we finally got some curtains and window treatments! Only did a few of the windows for now to try out the different vendors we're using and their products, but we're very happy so far. The curtains in the living room are a pretty dramatic red, but I think I like 'em. They're a faux silk material, fully lined, and they helped us pick the curtain rods and finials (did I spell that right?) that they're hanging from. If you look at the upper left hand corner of the first picture you'll see our rear speaker hanging riiiight next to the curtain rod. That's where the wiring is for that speaker and we would have had to move the pre-drilled (and pretty large) hole in order to move the speaker further from the window, which didn't seem to be worth the effort. So we had to work the curtain rod selection around it a bit, but it all worked out. Now the final thing we need to finish off this room is an entertainment unit for the TV and surround sound/stereo components. It's been a really tough search so far because nothing seems to fit both our large TV and W's oversized components, but we'll keep hunting.

The second room to get window treatments was the study. Poor W. was going blind because his desk faces the window and the glare coming through the temporary paper shades was making computer usage pretty hard. On the advice of the window designer lady we got faux woods blinds that are routeless--that is, it doesn't have holes for the strings to pass through so you can more fully block out light when the blinds are closed. The strings wrap around the invidual slats instead. W's loving 'em so far. Still need to get some curtains in here, but the new blinds are a big help for making the room look a little more polished. What would really help though is if we each cleaned up our desks :P

Finally, the last room we did was our bedroom. Here we got double honeycomb shades that you can pull up from the bottom or drop from the top for more privacy. They're like two layers of honeycombs you'd see in a beehive, only hollow, so the air in between actually helps insulate against exterior sound and loss of heat or A/C. The bedroom windows face out to the street so some sound insulation was important to us and anything that helps keep the heating bills down is a good thing. Can't wait to get some pretty curtains in here too to finish off the look. Notice W's very high-end end table, aka my stereo box. His actual end table is currently being used to hold the stereo components in the living room.

Curtains

Yay, the curtains for the living room are coming next week! On Tuesday, actually, so only four more days to wait. They originally told us it could take 6-8 weeks or something like that but it's only been about 3 weeks--hooray! I hope I like 'em once they're in; I wasn't 100% sold on them but W. and the designer convinced me to go with it so we'll see. Even if I don't like them, I will make myself like them given what we spent!

Our first furniture delivery and our second Cali visitor

We finally got our first piece of new furniture delivered. Boo for delays; hooray for the couch finally being here, and in one piece. It looks pretty good in the room, and we're really happy with the decision to go with the brown leather. Now I need some accent pillows and a throw blanket to dress it up a bit. A rug, couple of arm chairs, coffee table, end tables, lamps, TV, and entertainment unit would help too :P We're working on it....

The kitchen table and chairs are due to arrive either this week or next. I won't be too sad to see the green folding table go (though we're really grateful for the loaner, mom!). Then it's the super cool dining room table that arrives next in mid-November or so. It's much cooler looking in real life than in this pic. It's 55" square with a butterfly leaf that folds into the table so no storing an extra leaf under the bed (my parents have a traditional table like that and it's a pain to store and protect that extra leaf for the one or two times a year you actually use it). And we didn't get those chairs. They had cool ones at the store but they were something like $450 a piece so we went somewhere else and got chairs for about $110 each instead.

We also had our second visitor from California here for a visit this past weekend. Well, P. actually came up from Philly where he's currently at business school, but he's part of the Cali crew. W. filled in on Wharton's B team and P. wasn't kidding when he said it was b-school B...not the highest quality v-ball we've ever played, but W. enjoyed just being on the court again. I played one game, got a few good digs in, was happy. The Wharton team kicked Harvard's butt, which made P. happy. Why are people always out to get Harvard??? :) Then, in a dramatic and yet anti-climatic ending to the tournament, as Wharton met up with Kellogg in a heated game 2 in a best-of-three match with Wharton trailing by one game but up nine points in game 2, all the lights in the gym went out and a couple dozen of us were left in complete pitch blackness. Turns out we were way behind schedule and the gym was ready to close, so that was that. They couldn't get more than one measly light back on so they decided to call it a tie. What kind of project management skills do these HBS students have anyway? They also had forgotten to schedule refs for the playoffs and were begging some of us to stay.

There's a lot more of you S.F. folks (and even some of you more local people) that haven't come out yet...we're waiting with open arms, a porch light on, spare beds, and good times!

Our stuff is here!

Yay, our stuff is finally here! The moving truck arrived on Friday morning, promptly at 10:30am. They had called the night before to say they would be here between 10:30 and 11:00am, which is the smallest window I've ever been given by any sort of delivery or service person. Luckily the truck was able to park OK in front of our house (we're situated at kind of a funny intersection and regular access to the house is via a private driveway in the back), and in two hours the guys had all our stuff in the house and the futon and W's bike reassembled. Nice work!


They really pack those trucks in when they're driving cross country. Our stuff was stacked up to the roof, but amazingly there was no serious crushing of any boxes. The guy used a ladder to get to the things up top and take 'em down.

So now the house is a big mess with boxes and general stuff everywhere. Oh well, we'll get there a little bit at a time. We did finally make our first furniture purchase today too, a very cool counter-height table for the kitchen. The picture I took of it isn't very good so you all will just have to come visit us to appreciate it in person :) It'll be nice to have at least one piece of real "grown-up" furniture in the house. Bad news is that it's out of stock right now and we have to wait until late October or so to get it.

Oh, W. mowed our lawn for the first time today too. My parents gave us a manual mower that they didn't want anymore. Our lawn area is relatively small so we thought a manual machine would be more economical for us. It worked fine, but takes a little more effort--Willy definitely got a good workout. If we don't let it get quite so long in the future though, hopefully the mowing will be easier. The leaves are starting to change colors and fall here too, so more yard work but we're looking forward to enjoying a real Autumn for the first time in years.

We love having our own house!

So it's been five days since we closed on the house and even though we have next to no furniture, have a to-do list a mile long, and have been busy every minute of every day since we've moved back to Boston, we're still SO HAPPY with the house! It was obviously the right decision for us since we've had absolutely zero regrets so far. That might change once the credit card bills start rolling in though :P

I gotta say that furniture shopping really sucks. We've only been doing it for a few days and we're alreaady tired of it. Everyone says it's supposed to be fun, but I'm not enjoying it so far. Maybe that's because we're so desperate just to have something to sit on that it's hard to be patient to find the right couch/kitchen table/dining table/etc. Did I mention that we really have almost no furniture? Check it out:



Yesterday we bought two desks at IKEA though so W. can start working again. I get a desk too this time unlike our old apartment so now it's really "our" study. We've vowed to keep the clutter to a minimum, but only time will tell how that works out. The two folding chairs we borrowed from my family are too short for the desks though, so here was W's solution:

Yes, that's a phone book he's sitting on.


Other than that, the only other furniture we have is more stuff we borrowed from my parents. We have my old bed that we're tossing as soon as our new Tempur-Pedic bed shows up, and there's a folding table and two more chairs. At least we have something to sleep and eat on!