Gwnewch y pethau bychain

Whew!

Moving Day was Friday! Whee!

(Note: There are even more (and larger) pictures with captions at https://www.autographedcat.com/gallery/newapt — don’t miss the exciting story of the cat’s first night!)

Thursday night, we made a couple of trips over to the new place, in order to transport some fragile items which needed to be hand carried, and also to give the cats a night to run around and inspect the place before we showed up with all the furniture. The cats were suitably freaked out, hiding in the carriers for long stretches between venturing out to explore the strange barren landscape to which they had been transported. We made sure they had the fleece blanket (which was a Christmas present from joyeuse13 and abovenyquist a couple of years ago, so they had something which smelled right to comfort them.

Friday morning, we got up bright and early, and I set about disassembling the computers and A/V stuff and putting it out in our cars before the truck arrived. I was in the process of reclaiming all the cables behind my desk when the enormous truck arrived, along with Dustin and Jamal, the two men we were promised. We took a quick tour of the old apartment, and then they began the effort of trucking out our many boxes of books on handcarts.

I was extremely impressed with their work. They started spot on at 9am and we all done within 2 hours. We made quick drive over to the new place, and they brought everything in through the garage and had it all unloaded within about half an hour. Once we paid them for their hard work (including a nice tip for each of them), Declaring it time for lunch, we went down to the nice Mexican place on the corner, and then headed back to the old apartment to collect our shower curtain and some bits of stuff that didn’t get moved with the first push. (There’s still a ton to do over there. But it’s mostly flotsam and jetsam, plus some repair work to be done on the walls where we’d mounted shelves, before having out housecleaners come in for one last spiff up before we turn in the keys.

After I had a shower, we went down to Bed Bath and Beyond to get some things we’d been putting off until after the move, like a new set of dishes, and a sandwich grill, and a large trashcan for the kitchen. We made good use of the 20% coupon BB&B sends us every couple of weeks, which saved us a bundle on the expensive trashcan, and then headed home to start the process of unpacking. I got the computers set up (we’ve already decided that we are changing our layout in that room — we’re so used to being in our cozy little dining room nook at the old place, where all we had to do to look at the other’s screen was swivel our chair. We’ve discovered, in the giant cavernous room that will be our combination guestroom/office, that it’s a hassle to have to get up to see the other’s screen. We’ve also discovered that we say “Hey, look at this” to each other a LOT.

Of course, we didn’t our Internet service yet, since we were switching from Bellsouth/AT&T to Comcast for both our phone and data services, There was a bit of hassle getting the order originally, because the people who moved out never bothered to tell Comcast they were leaving, and they couldn’t transfer my service to the new address while someone else had service there, and the apartment complex couldn’t tell them they had moved out until they actually vacated on July 1. Then, when I called after they’d left, I was told (apparently erroneously) that they couldn’t start a workorder to install service until the workorder to disconnect the previous service had been completed on July 13, which was the day of the move. Luckily, on the day of the move, when I called again to try and establish service, I got a very helpful CSR who asked me to check and see if they’d already done the disconnect. They hadn’t, so she canceled the disconnection and transferred the service into our name, and even managed to get a tech scheduled for Sunday to install the Internet and phone portions.

Since our only Internet connection at this point was a cup of wireless borrowed from our neighbor’s unsecured router, which gave us the ability to check mail and chat, but was too slow for anything more than very casual web surfing and utterly useless for playing World of Warcraft, we busied ourselves actually unpacking that stuff we could actually unpack. The kitchen has more or less been arranged, and we’ve gotten all the CDs, cassettes, DVDs and VHS tapes up on the wonderful media rack that telynor gave us a couple of years ago. I’m ignoring the urges to sit down and alphabetize them all right now, but I’m sure it will overwhelm me before too much longer. It’s just nice to start getting our stuff up and where we want it. We’ve started hanging artwork as well, as we find good places to put them. Most of the books are still in boxes in the garage until we suss out exactly what we want to do about shelving. We may just go with old fashioned brick-and-board shelves, since I lack the necessary getupandgonitude to actually build proper ones right now, and I really don’t want to go through all the hassle of mounting shelving on the walls again right now.

I spent a good bit of time Saturday night using the borrowed wireless to research washers and dryers, since we no longer had our own (our previous W/D was provided by the apartment, and thus had to be left behind). I found more or less the model we wanted, and we noticed that Best Buy was having some sort of special if you bought two or more appliances at once, so we headed down there Sunday morning to see what we could see. We lucked out in a major way. The units that were one step up from the ones I’d priced out were on clearance, and $200 off each. Then they found out they didn’t have the washer in stick, and offered to sell us the floor models, so that was an extra $100 off. And they sold us the floor models of the pedestals for $60 off each. And we got 10% on top of that from the sale, even though the sale had officially expired the day before. And free delivery. All told, we got about $2400 worth of appliance for just over $1600, with tax. I consider this a win. Hell, I consider this a coup. They will deliver them to us next Saturday.

Meanwhile, life gets back to normal here. We had a lovely peppercorn beef brisket as our first meal in the new place, and watched the 1987 Ackroyd/Hanks Dragnet spoof on TVland — I really need to get that on DVD, as they chopped it to bits for commercial television. Last night, I made tacos and we watched the final two-parter of Season 3 of Doctor Who, which was quite satisfying to me, even if there were bits of it that were rather corny, my inner six year old was cheering wildly, and Doctor Who has always been, at least in part, about the inner six year old.

Life is good.

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29 Comments

  1. Oh, excellent! I really like your new kitchen. And, of course, it’s all about the kitchen with me. 🙂

    • The kitchen is *lovely*. The old one was so small and cramped that only one person could effectively be in there at a time. We now have more counter space, more cabinet space, and most importantly more floor space. It’s a big win.

      The three things that especially fell in love with when we first toured this place were:

      1) The bathtubs
      2) the kitchen
      3) the view out the windows

      Those really had a lot to do with our decision.

      • *sigh* We don’t have a bathtub.

        • You can borrow ours. `:)

          • Yay! I’ll pay shipping. 😉

          • It’d probably be cheaper to ship you here than to ship the tub there. 😉

          • You reminded me of my super-sly ex-wife, who when we were having sewer problems at my place, offered to let me shower at her place. Her shower had, she said, “A bottomless water heater”, and she was practically right. Way to endear yourself to me — make it easy for me to get clean. 🙂

            (Mom, to me: “Well, it’s nice of her to let you use her shower.” Me: “Well, we *are* dating, mom.” Mom: “You’re *WHAT*??!?!?!?” — I had come out to her a good half-dozen times, but this time, somehow, it sank in.)

      • bathtubS???? wow. wanna 🙂
        Yay on the move being done. Now of course we have to come visit to see the place. Ah I wish. Sigh.

  2. Glad to hear your move went well.

    Mine is ongoing at present. With Conestoga in the middle. Out by Aug 1.

    Must…load…trailer… 🙂

    • Good luck with your move upcoming!

      If you can afford to hire pros, I highly recommend it. This was the easest and most pleasant experience I’ve *ever* had moving house. (Of course, my two previous moves involved much less moving of stuff, but I really don’t recommend either method employed to others.)

  3. Oh, lovely! The new place looks very airy and spacious!

    Not that that seems to have impressed the poor cats. Hopefully, it’s less scary now with familiar furniture and stuff. Is Dayna named after the Blake’s 7 character, by any chance?

    Ours thinks the car is The Worst Thing That Can Happen To A Cat, Ever. When JT moved in, we drove up with her together so he could administer sympathy in the passenger seat. She cried piteously the whole way. And as soon as she was let out of the carrier, she found the deepest darkest hiding place there was and didn’t come out for *hours*.

    • Yup, she’s named for the Blake’s Seven character. The white cat is Jenna, and my ex, , has Cally, Vila, and Tarrant. 🙂

      Jenna has been making a sport out of finding impossible places to hide so that I have a panic attack when I can’t find her. So far, her best work has been in the hall closet (she got herself closed in there somehow), under the dresser, and inside the lining of the box springs.

      The new place *is* lovely and spacious. And has 10′ ceilings, which I really appreciate. We’ll have everything up on the walls and books on shelves and the like before too long, and then it’ll really look nice.

      • I can just imagine the response to a move if one of them was named Avon. 🙂

        • I have decided that one day I must have a tuxedo cat named Avon, but he will have to wait for a while. Vila is in charge around here, but still thinks he’s a small kitten, scared of everything. LOL! Tarrant is a jerk and an attention-hog (just like his name-sake), and Cally, well she is her own sweet self, but not all the time. 🙂

          AC, so sorry that I couldn’t help y’all pack last week. We were in rehearsals all week at night for the show at TimeGate, and then I had to work Friday, which I don’t usually. 🙁 Glad to hear that it all went well.

  4. Glad you’re all settled. 🙂

    • Getting there, anyway. Have to figure out what we’re doing about shelving. But it’s progress. 🙂

      You can see we’re still making good use of all the furniture you gave us. 🙂

  5. Wow. Never seen a kitchen like that in an apartment. w00t.

    • Yeah, that was definitely a selling point. Actually having room for more than one person in the kitchen at a time is a *huge* goodness.

  6. *chuckles* at the cat-photostory. Very nice looking flat & significantly more spacious than your previous one, yay! I like the kitchen/dining area. 🙂 (Not sure how I’d feel about that huge mirror, though.)

  7. Wow, that place looks way awesome. I would love to see it in person. Maybe now that you are settled in we can plan a dinner…

    • That sounds awesome. Besides, we finally live in a place we can invite you over and not feel like we need to apologize for the place. 😉

  8. I’m glad things went well! The place looks great -- and with a garage too! Will the garage just be a “home for stuff” or will you eventually be able to put one of the cars in there?

    So when’s the housewarming?? ;p

    • Probably weekend after next, since this weekend is the housefilk at J&A’s.

      You, of course, are welcome over anytime. 😉

  9. Home, sweat home. Enjoy!

    Ann O.

  10. *hugses* Welcome home! 🙂

    *virtual bottle of wine for housewarming*

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