Settling In.

Sunday. A trio of college-aged guys successfully moved our things from the moving truck into the house. So far there have only been a few scratches, one chipped plate, and about half a Costco-sized SoftSoap container's worth of soap pooling on the hardwood floor. Luckily the box it exploded in had some textbooks that H was not particularly tied to, and it was a fairly easy cleanup once we spotted it. How that lid came off I will never understand.

Monday. After attempting to dry a load of laundry unsuccessfully and having all of the exhaust and condensation leak into the surrounding wall, I spent the better part of the day between Lowes and Home Depot cherry picking usable parts and installing what ended up being an acceptable Frankenstein of rigid and flexible metal tubing. I also picked up a few groceries and drove around a little to get a feel for the nearby highways.

An Ode To Highways

Oh wondrous roads, you hold so many

Cars run free and goodness, quite speedy

But why thou has such stoplights pretty?

No service roads to creep up stealthy?

And what the heck is with this cloverleaf entry?

I doth covet the increased speed limits, clearly. 

Seriously, though. You can't call it a highway if there's a light. But kudos for having high speed limits and none of that silly merging on-again off-again traffic due to the limited exits. Oh, and the cloverleafs (cloverleaves?) make me feel like I'm driving in a half pipe in a racing game. Not that that's a bad thing.

Tuesday. Let there be internet! In the words of my father, "it was like living in a third world country." No, it really was. Want to know how to get somewhere? That takes data. What about what the weather's like? Data. Need to know what happens after the cliffhanger season four ender of Grey's Anatomy? It was just chaos. No, not the show, my liiiiife. But then a nice man came from the internet company and said something needed to be hooked up outside, and I could listen to my Pandora Dance Mix station again. Then things really started rolling. 

I did myself a favor and washed out all of the empty cabinets in the kitchen before putting all of the old kitchen inside them. Mostly it was just crumbs and dust, but there was one large shelf that had green dye all over it. My guess: this was the previous owners' Easter egg decorating shelf, and the only color they liked was green. Or maybe their approximately five-year-old (judging by the installed drawer locks on every. single. drawer.) kid wanted to be a dinosaur pinata for Halloween. 

With everything nice and tidy I could begin the slow process of deciding where everything should go from an efficiency standpoint. You know what I'm talking about - you want to make sure that when you're at the peak of your cooking, when the pasta is boiling over and the ground beef is just about to burn if you don't add that red tomato sauce, that you know exactly where your strainer and your pasta sauce is because if you don't then you have ruined dinner. You'll probably still eat it because there ain't no way you're spending another thirty to forty-five minutes setting up something else, but that's not the point. 

What ended up happening in my expertly decided new kitchen is that I left two slim upper cabinet spaces for "spices" and crammed everything else with its likely partners (baking supplies separate from cooking supplies), then realized I don't have nearly the spice army I thought I did and now I have two empty spots. Two, three-shelved empty spots. Not to mention my dastardly plan to wrangle my cutting boards into that space above the microwave that never gets used failed when the upper cabinet was not deep enough to accommodate my largest board. So now I've split up the family, with the three children living in the upper cabinet and the momma and poppa living in a bottom condo (slim, vertical cabinet) with the rest of my cookie sheet and muffin tin troop. 

There is one extremely cool detail about the new kitchen that I did not know about when we put an offer in on the house (you can't check everything, right?) but am suuuper glad is part of it.

This picture is of the bottom corner cabinet in the kitchen. 

That, my friends, is an industrial sized Lazy Susan. It twirls, it swirls, and so far it holds a myriad of baking tools, glass mixing bowls, and cooking prep utensils. It's the coolest. Here's what it looks like in action. 

Wednesday. Unpacking. I would be more descriptive, but that's pretty much it. And talking to the post office about why we are not getting any mail two weeks after purchasing the house. Turns out if you buy a house from someone with the same first and last name as you and they decided to use mail forwarding for the entire Same Last Name family, then you will never see your mail again. It's funny because every post office employee I spoke to has never heard of that happening, ever. Hopefully this can be sorted out. 

Thursday. More unpacking. Oh! I did see a bunch of guys on motorcycles on the highway. If a group of crows is called a murder, and a group of whales is called a pod, what do you call a group of motorcyclists? I want to say gang, but then I could be wrong.

Friday. Would you believe me if I said I was tired of unpacking? Because I was, I so was. So when I met with H for lunch and he said, "Why don't you just enjoy your last day off before work on Monday?", I ran with it. I went to the handy-dandy Nebraska Furniture Mart that afternoon, trolling for clearance items that would fit into our new abode. A cool coffee table for the living room and an island for the kitchen were my top priorities, and while I didn't buy anything I do have a few neat ideas in my noggin for what will work and what will not. For instance, I saw the coolest limestone slab used as a coffee table, but the legs were of an uninteresting metal variety (plus I could barely lift one end of the table). There was also this coffee table that had the option to lift the top off and up along a guided rail so that you could sit on the couch and eat off of it if you so desired; but I didn't like the design on the top.

As for the kitchen, you could go with the Paula Deen $1500 cruise ship of an island (complete with blow torch and wine bar), or there was this pretty cute butcher block top, all wood one with a flip-down bar but no barstools for a more reasonable price.

I think this butcher block top is more what I want, more usable. 

This one has a lot more viable storage space,
but I would need to be careful of the finished wood top. 

After spending a leisurely two hours meandering around and not buying a single thing, I decided to head over to the Habitat for Humanity Restore nearby. This would have been my third one to go to in the KC area, and it's kind of like a box of chocolates. You never really know what you're gonna get. The first one had more appliances, the second had more furniture, and the third had a plethora of tempered glass shelves in various sizes (definitely going back there when something that I buy in the future breaks a shelf even further in the future). The last one I went to had an army of front doors.

I like to entertain the idea that after watching twenty episodes of Flea Market Flip I have enough starter knowledge to take something old and turn it into something brand spankin' new. Kind of like this dresser to island transformation. But I should probably start out small and do an end table or a night stand to begin with.

That's all from the frontier for now. Tomorrow is my first day of work, but it kind of feels like a continuation of my old job. Same company, different work setting, and very different tasks and goals. I think I'm ready for it.