Outside the Box

Our new driveway was roped off until Thursday, but we still haven't had a chance to use it because Friday morning our storage pods were delivered. We had three of these suckers packed full of our stuff, and that was the only place we could put them.
The Verizon guy also came back Friday morning to get the rest of our phone jacks working. After he left, Josh and I tried to get some work done before the movers came back to help us unload the pods. As I was sitting at my desk, something caught my eye outside. There was a one-armed man walking around the back yard and talking on his cell phone. Normally, I would have been a bit concerned, but he kept looking up at the roof, so we guessed he was here to investigate why we had a waterfall coming off the side of the house during the torrential rains on Thursday (which was witnessed by both Rob and Steve W). I emailed Rob just to be sure, and he confirmed that the one-armed man was indeed one of Attila the Roofer's guys.

The same three guys who moved us out of our apartment came back around 1 pm to help us unload the pods. After living without all that stuff for 6 months, it was hard to believe it was all ours. The books alone turned my office into a cubicle!
Even though our old kitchen was pretty tiny, we sure had a lot of kitchen stuff. Josh had his work cut out for him trying to figure out where to put all of it.
We even had boxes stacked up in the bathroom, just to get them out of the way.It was good to have our living room furniture back. It's the only furniture we have that is really nice enough to go with our new, improved house. I mentioned to our neighbor, Alan, that a lot of our old furniture seems a shabby now in comparison to the new surroundings, and he said that it sounded like the Diderot Effect -- a sort of internalized "keeping up with the Joneses." Now that we have a new house, we will feel compelled to buy all new furniture to go with it. Of course, our bank balance will keep us from succumbing too far to the whims of Diderot...
The master bedroom looks a bit nicer with a bed in it.
As does the front bedroom upstairs. We have houseguests arriving Tuesday night, so we need to get all the bedrooms set up by then.
Our 50-inch TV used to dominate the family room -- and completely overwhelmed our apartment -- but now it actually looks kind of small. We were initially planning to put built-in cabinetry on either side, but that was scrapped for budgetary reasons. We'll have to come up with something else to do with the space.Josh treated our new soapstone countertops with mineral oil. Boy, are they green!
After several hours of unpacking, we invited our friends Rob and Diana and our neighbor Alan over for dinner Friday night to help us make a dent in all the leftover Lebanese food. (We made a valiant effort, but there was still a ton of food left.) Alan is moving to Alabama this week -- his wife and son have already left -- so we offered him our moving boxes. While we are very sad to see them go, at least the timing worked out such that as we unpack our boxes, we can just walk them across the street to Alan's house so he can pack them with his stuff.