Oh my goodness. This past weekend was one of the busiest/most hectic/exhausting weekends of my life. Friday was my 20th birthday!! It was the end to my 20 Before Twenty. My mom and uncle came into town from southern Illinois. We also moved out of our old apartment and into our new one! All on Friday alone. Saturday and Sunday were spent moving boxes around/unpacking/cleaning/running to the hardware store/having the landlord’s maintenance guy fix all the little things in the apartment and also spending every second possible running around New Orleans to the Garden District/French Quarter/cemeteries/streetcar/mall/restaurants/French Market and so on, to show my mom and uncle New Orleans in a nutshell. It was a pretty insane weekend. (Saturday was also my niece, Evie’s, birthday–she turned 6!) Most of our stuff is all still in boxes, the house still needs a lot of cleaning, and my entire body aches from all the moving and lifting and scrubbing and walking.
But we are in our new apartment! I really love it already! It seems so much bigger than when we looked at it. The foyer and living room at the front of the new house alone are about the same size as Drew’s entire old apartment. I am LOVING all the windows in here. Especially with this amazing weather we have been having here lately! (in the 70s with no humidity and a cool breeze!) We’ve had the windows open throughout the house and we haven’t had to have the air conditioning on since Friday! They also let in so much sunlight and views of the trees outside, so it feels so much more like home. (I was raised in the country, in a house with lots of windows and trees all around) I absolutely love when the indoors and outdoors are so connected. You can sit in the living room and feel almost as if you are outside. LOVE it! The kitchen also feels so much bigger than our old one and having a pantry and a dishwasher are amazing! So is having a full size fridge! I feel more like an adult now! Having a bigger bathroom and a separate bedroom are amazing too! It is funny how you notice all the little things after living in such a small space!
Overall, it is just so nice to have all our stuff in one place and to be working on making this house our home together. We know that we are going to be here at the very least for two years because that is how much school I have left. Although since Drew is already forming a good little niche in the area he works in, we will probably be here longer than that. It is nice to be able to make changes and feel better about making this place more ours since it is a little more permanent. I’m so happy to have a place that finally feels mine. It is such an amazing feeling! I never moved around as a kid. We always lived in our same house on the land that my family had lived in for generations. So the first time I ever really lived anywhere different was in my dorm rooms at school. I’m a pretty homey person and sorry, but a dorm room just doesn’t cut it. Those rooms never really felt like home. I had a good time and have lots of memories of them, but I always knew that pretty soon I would be leaving them. I’ve spent quite a good amount of time at Drew’s apartment too over the past two years, but it never felt like home really either. I didn’t have my stuff there and it just wasn’t mine. So it is so nice that finally I have a place that can be my first little home.
That isn’t to say that the last few days have been just peachy either. We couldn’t get Drew’s desk up the stairs to the second floor of the new apartment. It was too heavy and we were all exhausted by the time we got to it. So we had to give it away. We also had some issues with the dryer plug being a safety hazard with the cord right on top of the washer and when they tried to fix it they broke our dryer. Drew spent several hours yesterday and a few more today taking the thing apart, cleaning it, checking all the parts, re-wiring the cord they wired incorrectly, and putting all the dryer back together and I think it finally works now. I was taking a shower the first night we moved in and I looked up at the little window in the bathroom and the entire thing was covered in termites. They were crawling and flying everywhere. Up the shower walls, across the shower and on my soap and shampoo bottles. They were flying into the water and drowning and then floating around my feet in the dirty water in the bottom of the tub that takes forever to drain. That was one of the least pleasant experiences of my life, lets just leave it at that. The maintenance guy had to fix the drywall mudding and taping in my office room and his sanding got white dust all over almost everything in the entire house. He, of course, left it all for us to clean.
So anyway, that is what all I’ve been up to. I wanted to post about lots of things going on this weekend but just haven’t had time before now. Tomorrow I’ll try to get up a house tour of the empty house before we moved in and an update of a few little things we’ve already been working on. I also have the new couch to show you and pictures of the lovely window box we discovered in the kitchen window and have already planted full of flowers and herbs. I also need to post the outcome of my 20 Before Twenty. Stay tuned! 🙂
