The Move: We're unpacked!

Ok, so here are some pics of our place unpacked. You've already seen the kitchen, bathrooms, our room, and the guest rooms don't look much different, but here's the living room--sorry it's dark!

View from the other side

Here's the entry

One of the first weekends we were here there was a sidewalk chalk art festival at the Gateway, an outdoor mall near our house. Here are some of our favorites!

Mermaid with glass beads laid on top of the chalk for her scales

Red Panda--one of my fave zoo animals!

This one was by far the most realistic... his Escher drawing really looked 3 dimensional!

Jimi Hendrix

This last random pic is Bob's Jucy Lucy... a hamburger that you make with cheese in the center of the patty. It's from a Man Vs Food episode we'd just watched and he had to try it out--he loved it!

The Move Part II!

We were so excited to finally move into our place! And now you finally get to see it too! This first shot shows you the lovely view out onto our little patio (2nd floor) and across to the neighbor's. What more could you want? :) Lilo loves that spot to soak up the sun--she spends 90% of the sunny days there sprawled out and loving every second!

Here you see the living room/kitchen and my handsome husband! Lots of big cabinets, nice granite countertops, and we loved the pendant lights.

Here's our bedroom looking into our bathroom and closet--and the first box the mover's brought in!

It didn't take long to fill up our apartment, and the front hallway was narrowed quickly!

Then, after much unpacking was done, the front hall remained quite full with all the empty boxes! We put them on Craig's list and they were gone the next way. We would have just chucked them, but they were super nice! The wardrobe boxes have a nice bar across the top so you can hang all your clothes and it seemed wasteful to throw them all away. Also, somehow our apartments don't recycle! We're not crazy hippies by any means, but after living in the very granola and super-recycling area of Olympia, where we had curbside comingled recycling (no sorting, everything but glass in the same bin), yard waste, glass, and trash containers, this was a big adjustment and throwing everything away feels so wasteful! We're really hoping they sort it at the dump?? Sorry Earth!

This is our poor office, in a state of partial unpacking... It was the default when the movers asked, "where do you want this?" The guest room was just as bad! 3 bedrooms were filled rapidly!

Believe it or not, I unpacked almost the whole kitchen the first day--I started there when they were bringing boxes in since at least all the kitchen things have a clear home--so many other boxes were tough to unpack because you'd realize you'd not yet unpacked the place those things needed to be put away in! This also demonstrates our monstrous pantry cupboards!

View down the kitchen into the dining room nook--getting closer to unpacked!

Our bedroom was crazily crowded for a few days... nearly floor to ceiling boxes! And you can see our footboard there--I don't know that this gives you the most accurate understanding of how incredibly too large our bed was for our bedroom.... our room is actually a decent size, but it's longer and not so wide, so our quite wide bed took up pretty much the whole thing! We'd have room for only one dresser and would not be able to shut and open our bedroom door and would have to shimmy around the bed with minimal clearance... hence we sold it!

Here we have the guest bathroom. Great place for the chairs, right? The dining room nook was full of boxes initially, so no room for table and chairs initially!

This move meant a LOT of downsizing. Our house was huge and we were very spoiled, and unfortunately we definitely filled the space we had. So, we really went through all our stuff and got rid of fluff. That included our clothes as our new closet is a bit smaller than the old one. I was very impressed that I narrowed my shoes to 30 pairs, but Bob still felt that was too many. In my defense, 8 are flip flops, which can hardly be considered real shoes, right? They all have a purpose, they all get worn, so they're all staying! To work on reducing our excess clothes, we hung all our hangers backwards, and as we wear things we turn them around, so in 6 months, any that aren't turned around will go away. Seems like a great idea, but we'll see how we feel in 6 months!

Here's my shoes after I finished sorting out the goners

Our room was one of the first rooms we got organized

We put an extra shelf halfway down in the closet as well as the shoe rack to organize it a bit more

Our new bed has a cool leather headboard and is a more proportionate size for our bedroom! Didn't cost too much either, especially since we sold the old one for a good price on ksl! We changed out this quilt for our lighter summer blanket shortly after this pic as it has been HOT here!

Our living room was initially pretty full, and this is a midway pic with many boxes unpacked, believe it or not! The couch and loveseat had to be stacked due to space limitations and hence we got rid of the couch (KSL again) and kept the loveseat and 2 chairs which fit far better.

Ok, so sorry you still don't have the moved in pics, but now you have an idea of what our place looks like! Pictures are up on the walls now and we're pretty settled so I'll take more pictures this week and put them up soon. Hope you all had a great weekend and sorry if this was WAY more pictures than anyone wanted of a not so exciting topic for you all! For us unpacking 238 boxes was a pretty huge deal! :)

The Move, Part I :)

Ok, so here are some move pics. Most not so exciting, but here we are at the start, boxes for appliances out and ready!

The guy that packed up the kitchen was so awesome and super-fast!

As soon as they'd pack up some boxes they'd load em into the truck--these guys were efficient!

Decent stack at the end of the hall

Here's one of the trucks mostly full

When all the boxes were gone we were clean machines! Thanks to Dorothy and Bill and Deb we got it all done! I was especially proud of the fridge--that's a lot of work!

Our very empty room!

Dining room

kitchen

We were definitely sad to leave--we've loved our 3 years out here and Bob had done some great projects around the house that not only improved it, but made it ours. It was our first HOUSE, and although it was way bigger than what the 2 of us needed, we loved it and our life in Lacey so much and it's sad to leave, even though we knew good things were ahead. We'll miss all our Lacey friends and Madigan so much!

Once we'd cleaned it all up we headed to Coeur d'Alene! We had a chance to visit with our Poteets and had a great time! Here's Grayam in the van

Brand new Baby Gibson! We were so excited to get to meet him!

Mandy and I!

We also saw my fam, but I didn't take many pics, but I did get Rocky (my litte brother's dog) on Bob's lap :) Perfect sized lapdog, right?

Dan working it up at Domino's

Paul hard at work as well!

We stayed with Bob's folks and enjoyed getting to see them too as always! Bob and his Dad were going through some boxes in the basement looking for a missing pair of boots and ended up finding this awesome muff that Bob was kind enough to model for us!

Lilo found the heat dish and was in heaven! It was a little chilly in the basement in early June!

After a day and a half in CDA we were off to Pocatello to visit the Jeppsens. Jen was gone for a conference but Jap and the kids were so much fun! Jappy made us some great food and we had fun just hanging out with our nieces and nephew! They always enjoy wrestling with Bob and this trip was no different!

Here Bob is, totally getting those girls! I especially love his Dr. Pepper in the foreground--he was willing to set in down just long enough to play with them!

But the girls retalliated!

I loved this in-action shot with B's hair flying!

And who knew she'd turn on her sister!

Jay had a great time wearing Bob's shoes

I love his face, like "What? These are totally my shoes!"

Here they are in a true doggy pile with Lilo on top

and one without Lilo

We were sad to leave the Jeppsens but excited that we'll hopefully get to see a lot more of them soon since we're going to be living closer now!

We drove into Salt Lake on Saturday morning after some delicious french toast by Jap but when we checked into our apartments they weren't quite ready.... the unit we were supposed to take had trashed floors from the prior tenant. We had picked one with stained concrete, which you'd think would be pretty durable, but somehow these people made huge gouges in them! (4-5 inch chunks of missing concrete!) So they showed me another unit which was beautiful, but wasn't in one of the buildings attached to the garage, which is the whole reason we picked this complex... (I was trying to think of the cold snowy winter and I think I'll really appreciate coming right in from the garage with all the groceries!) So I said no go and was getting really frustrated because they couldn't give a firm timeframe for when those floors would be fixed because they'd just switched concrete companies. They were really nice about it and we settled on another unit which was our same floorplan but with maple floors instead, and the tenant had just moved out so they were going to have to rush to clean it in time. So, instead of moving in Saturday, we were to move in Monday. Luckily, the movers weren't there yet, so we knew we were ok til Monday. Also, the leasing agent waived a bunch of fees including the monthly pet fee for the term of our lease and 1/2 the deposit for our inconvenience, which was really nice. They offered us the option to stay there that weekend in another vacant unit, but Karl and Christi were kind enough to take us in so we stayed the weekend with them, after we also took advantage of Karl's mad strength to help unload our Penske truck into the storage unit. We took them out to dinner to repay them at a place called Roosters that was really good and had a hugely varied menu that was pretty fun!

While we stayed with them, we were continually enjoying Easton's love for Bob! He always wants to be with him and it's super cute

Easton LOVES his Bob so much! He likes Lilo too, but calls her "kitty" because his doggie is a LOT bigger and she's more the size of his kitties! She was a trooper and tolerated many of his pets that were a little snug around her neck!

Ok, we really did make it into our place that Monday, and I'll post those pictures soon, but I start work tomorrow so I'm not sure how soon I'll get to that! I hope you all had a great 4th of July! We've had a great holiday weekend so far and are headed to a Bee's game tonight (local AAA team) with fireworks afterward!