Shop 'Til You Drop

We spent most of Saturday shopping for items we needed for the house. Josh has been eager to get some bar stools for the dining room, but we can't afford the Stickley stools that match our dining table and chairs, so we ended up going in a completely different direction. We bought these stools for $50/each at one of those unfinished furniture stores and will stain them ourselves to match the oak panel on the back of the bar. Rob left us the wood stain he used on the panel, so even though the stools are not oak, we should be able to get a pretty close match.
We are also in desperate need of window treatments -- especially in the bedrooms -- and bath towels. We hit Pottery Barn and Restoration Hardware, since they were both having big sales and we like a lot of their stuff. I discovered that Restoration Hardware's "Silver Sage" towels are a perfect match for the master bathroom.We also found some drapes we liked for the master bedroom, but they didn't have them in stock at the Alexandria store, so we had to drive up to the Tyson's Corner store and buy them there. By then it was 8 pm, so we grabbed a quick dinner in the food court and caught an 8:40 showing of the latest "Harry Potter" movie.

We had to get up very early on Sunday morning as Rob had arranged for the plumber to come at 7 am. (No he doesn't hate us -- that was just the only time he was available.) He needed to install a new tub filler in the master bath (Rob determined that the original one was defective) and figure out why the water wasn't draining out of our new dishwasher. Rob still has all the owner's manuals for our kitchen appliances and everything else they installed in the house, which he is supposed to organize into a binder for us -- but in the meantime, I've had to download them from the Internet when something crops up. (At least we figured out how to get the microwave to heat things in 30-second bursts.) Unfortunately, most of the troubleshooting tips for the dishwasher were beyond our capabilities.

Brian (the plumber), and his assistant, Bob, showed up a little after 7. They made short work of installing the new tub filler, but could not see what the problem was with the dishwasher. Brian asked how many times we had run it and what kind of soap we used. I said we'd only run it once and used regular Cascade powder. Then he told us a story about how he once ran out of dishwasher detergent, so he put a little bit of Palmolive soap in the cup, turned it on, and took his dog for a walk. When he got home, there were 3 feet of soap suds on his kitchen floor. It sounded just like one of those scenes you see in sitcoms or silly movies, but rarely seems to happen in real life. The fact that he is a plumber and really should have known better made the story all the funnier.

Anyway, we finally figured out that the plug had never been removed from the hose that connects the dishwasher to the garbage disposal. Since we re-used our old disposal, he had assumed that the plug had already been removed, but in our old kitchen, the dishwasher was on the opposite side of the room from the sink, so they weren't connected. Brian knocked out the plug, and we were all relieved to hear the sound of water draining out of the dishwasher. Yay!

After doing laundry, sweeping up all the dirt and debris that the movers tracked into the house, and unpacking a few more boxes, we went over to the apartment in the afternoon to pick up the rest of our stuff. We still had to empty out the refrigerator and two storage closets, retrieve our houseplants, and clean up. We only managed to do about half of that before we filled up the car, so we went home and unloaded the car, and then I dropped Josh back at the apartment to get his bike and drove down to Target to do some more shopping for essentials like toilet paper and window shades. By the time I got home it was after 8 pm, so we had some dinner (Lebanese food, of course), did some more work on the house, and collapsed around midnight.

After taking Thursday and Friday off, Josh had a heck of a time getting ready for work this morning, since his regular routine is completely thrown off by the new house. It will take some getting used to -- especially the whole upstairs/downstairs thing. The truck arrived soon after he left to retrieve the empty storage pods, so we have our driveway back for one day. Tomorrow Rob will be back -- "bright and early" -- to take care of some final issues and supervise the landscaping. They'll be weeding, re-seeding, and regrading our back yard and installing a brick patio off the back stairs. I have a series of meetings at Discovery tomorrow afternoon, so I may miss most of it, but I'll try to get some photos in the morning before I leave.