General Update :)

In one way, the past month has been almost unpleasantly boring and uneventful.

You remember me saying that we were supposed to move into one apartment, but that it wasn't finished being renovated?  Yeah, it's still not finished, and we don't expect it to be finished until (they say) November.  In reality, it may never be finished.  There hasn't been any work done in the last month.

We've had a long month of illness and a busy work schedule.  Seriously, I was sick three different times (flu, pink eye, then a cold), and Justin was sick twice (flu and then later a cold).  Thankfully, we seem to be nearing the end of the latest colds.  :)  School started on Monday, so we spent quite a bit of time preparing for that and then troubleshooting whatever problems came up for families or teachers during the school year.  It's actually pretty fun, but a lot of work.

In another way, the past month has been eventful.

We decided to move into my childhood home for a while.  My parents are in the process of selling it, and it will be on the market for a little while longer, which means that the moving process will be interesting.  Right now, my strategy is to take a few laundry baskets full of stuff over each day and unpack them.  I'm hoping that this will leave the house in a showable condition even though moving is an intrinsically messy process.

So that's pretty much what's up in the Richmond household.  :)  Nothing too exciting, but we like it that way!

House Tour - The Kitchen

Last but not least, we come to the kitchen.  This is usually my favorite place - the heart of the home, so to speak.    But not this kitchen.  This kitchen is barely functional and doesn't have nearly enough work space, so that really limits me as far as what I can cook.  So anyway, all that to say that I don't spend much time here, and so it's not quite as well-maintained as the rest of the house.

Also, no dishwasher.  >_<

This is what you see when you first come into the kitchen.  You can see here all the usable cabinet space - and half of it is above the fridge where I can't reach anything.  It took some creativity to find space for all my dishes, pot and pans, and groceries, which you will see in a few minutes.

The fridge is the second we've gotten - the first one didn't keep anything cold.  Our milk went bad in three days.  Thankfully, this one does much better, though it sometimes gives off a weird chemical smell.  Maybe something to do with the cooling?

This is one of my "storage stations."  I didn't unpack all of our glasses, though there are usually more than what are on the shelf... I guess I was behind on the dishes when I took these pictures.  :)  These are just wooden crates I got at A.C. Moore a long time ago.  They've worked as craft supply storage, bookshelves, canned good storage, and now storage for dishes.

In this picture, you can see all the counter space I have available.  Yup, that's it.  Just one little measly counter.  I try to keep it clear so I can at least make sandwiches or something there!

This is my other storage solution.  I've rearranged a lot in here, but you get the gist.  Everything is out in the open for people to see... so I try to keep it pretty organized!

Thankfully, I have this pantry!  The shelves are deep and wide enough to fit plenty of food.  One of the shelves keeps falling, but fortunately nothing has broken - yet.  :)

Behind the pantry door, there's a back door to our apartment.  It's always locked and actually I use the space between the two doors as laundry-related storage.

And there you have it: the tiny kitchen!  As I looked through these pictures, I realized that I've actually changed the kitchen quite a bit since I took those pictures.  Maybe I'll go back and take more so you can see the difference, and just how much better it looks now.  :)

House Tour - The Dining Room

Welcome to the dining room!  This is our first real, official dining room - at all our previous apartments, we just had a little nook that was just big enough for the table and not much else.

This is what you can see when you first enter the dining room.  Obviously, I'm not completely unpacked in here -- and I don't plan to unpack this stuff while we're here.  So there it sits, in ugly boxes.

We put all four of our bookshelves in here, mainly because there isn't a better place for them to go!  The window looks out into a little grassy yard with a shed in it.  When I took these pictures, the windows were almost completely overgrown with massive vines.  Someone came and cut them down last week, and it makes such a huge difference in how tidy the room looks!

There's a tiny window that you can sort of see in this picture.  That belongs to a tiny little apartment that is right behind ours.  I can't imagine how small it must be - there really isn't a lot of space on this end of the building that doesn't belong to us!

This is what you can see next to the bookshelves (above).  There's a pretty good-sized closet behind the chair, which is completely stuffed full of boxes.  Hopefully, these boxes are going into storage at some point, because I've accumulated a lot of stuff that should go in this closet - stuff that we'll actually use in the near future, like toilet paper, detergent, and flour.  :)

This is the entry into the living room from the dining room.  Not super exciting!

This is Justin's chalk board.  He uses it for tutoring, though right now we can't find any chalk, so it's kind of useless at the moment.  You can also see part of the kitchen, which is the last room we'll go to.

These bookshelves are next to the kitchen door.  One of them has all books, and the other has mostly DVDs and dishes.  The three other bookshelves are packed full of books, though, so I anticipate having to get another bookshelf soon.

It's been nice to have a dining room, especially when we have company coming over, but I think that if I was going to be here for long, I'd rearrange and put the desks in the dining room instead of the table.  I'd move the living room back to where the office currently is, and put the dining table in front of the fire place.  If we're here long enough that we need to turn the heaters on, that's what we'll have to end up doing anyway.

Coming up next: the kitchen!

House Tour - The Living Room & Office

And now, you get to see a very hard to photograph room: the living room and office.  There are gigantic windows in the office area and my little camera doesn't have enough oomph to handle it, but I think you'll get the general idea.  :)

When you walk out of the bedroom, the bathroom is on your left and the living room is on your right. This is what you can see.  The office is right behind the couch -- it's not really a separate room, but the paint colors and the couch make it feel like a different place.

 This is our new front door.  See the pretty frame?  That's new, and all because we complained.  lol :)  We got the clock from my aunt and uncle (thanks, Laura & Mike!) as a wedding gift.  I bought the red lamp shade at a thrift store ($3, yay!) and pulled the lamp out of a Dumpster.  Justin had the magazine rack / end table before we got married, along with the rocks -- I realize you can't see it here, but they're actually kind of cool. :)

You can see the front closet at the left side of the picture.  This is mostly just used for storage right now (things are still in boxes in there :) ).  Justin had this little love seat when we got married, and it's actually a gross orange-pink color.  A brown slip cover really helps here!

This is the mantel (right over the love seat).  I had the mirror for a long time, but most of the other things were gifts at one time or another.  :)

This is my little reading corner.  :)  We got the chair for free, and even though it's ugly, it's super comfortable. My great-grandma made this blanket and gave it to me shortly before she died.  It's very pretty, don't you think?  It's also warm, which makes it great for reading in the winter.

Directly across from the mantel and brown love seat is the office.  I'm not showing you much of it because it's mostly a storage area right now since this apartment is not big enough to fit all of our stuff.  :)

This is our comfiest couch.  :)  It separates the office from the rest of the room.  The brown pillows used to be in the bedroom, and the blue ones used to be in the study, but like I said before... our color scheme had to change unexpectedly with this move.

The very first thing people see when they come to visit us is this picture of the flowers, and I get more compliments on it then I can even remember.  It's funny because I also had it in our old apartment, but the placement is a million times better here.  (Thanks, Alice!)

This is the view from the living room into the dining room, which will be our next stop.  :)

House Tour - The Bedroom

And now, we'll move on to the bedroom.  It's barely big enough to fit all of our furniture bedroom furniture, and you can forget about including anything extra (bookshelves, craft tables, etc.).  As you can see, most of the walls are pink (there's one dark purple one, for whatever reason), so I couldn't use all of our red bedroom stuff in here.  Thankfully, I rarely get rid of blankets, so I still had this purple and green quilt that's too small for the bed, but it at least matches, which is all I really care about.  :)

 This is what you see when you're coming into the bedroom.  (For reference, it's immediately to the left of the bathroom.)  You can see almost the entire bedroom from this view.

I'm happy that my little pink lamp finally has a place to live.  I've had this lamp since I was about six years old (right, Mom?).  You can also see more of the old quilt on the bed.  My mom made the purple pillows for us -- they sat on the couch with our previous decorating scheme, but they fit in this room well.

We set our old TV (and the X-Box, VCR, and PlayStation) on my hope chest.  This is because we literally had no other place to put them.  :)

From here, you can see the other side of the bed.  I put a crate on top of the radiator to give us a little bit of storage space.  We keep the books we're currently reading there, as well as my makeup bag and nail polish. You can't see her very well in this picture, but my little garden faerie sits on top of the crate.  I have a different plant there now - one called a "purple waffle," courtesy of a friend at church.

Oh, and that's Justin's diploma on the wall.  Some day, I'll find a better frame for it, but considering the fact that it sat in a box for over a year, I'm just happy it's finally displayed somewhere.

As you can see, we get a lot of sunshine in this window in the afternoons!

This is the view out the window above.  I'm not totally sure why I didn't take a picture of the other window, but the picture below is the view from that one:

This is the purple wall.  It's not a bad color per se, but it definitely wasn't a good choice for this particular room.  Thankfully, it looks mostly brown a lot of the time.  Our big dresser fits perfectly on this little wall (and it wouldn't have fit anywhere else, so I'm glad it did!).  The picture on the wall is from the first time we had our picture taken together as a couple (we were dating at the time) - December 2009.

My favorite snow globe is on the dresser, too.  It has two swans in it, and I've had it for as long as I can remember.  (If anyone knows when I got it, please tell me!)

You can see our tiny closet -- we do have more clothes, but they're mostly still packed away.  I got a few nicer casual outfits, some church clothes, and that's about it aside from jeans and t-shirts.

Oh, and the cat box lives in the closet.  This has turned out okay so far; or if our clothes do smell like the cat box, nobody has told me yet!  (Just kidding.  It gets cleaned out each day, so there's really no opportunity for it to smell.  :) )  The down side to this is that the closet is always open, so people can see our shoes in the rack and all of our clean clothes.

This is the door we first came in through.  You can see our second shoe rack (we have a lot of shoes), the hallway that the previous tenant painted black (?), and the linen closet, which actually mostly has cleaning supplies in it.

Next up: the living room / study!

House Tour - The Bathroom

Welcome to the tour of our new apartment!  It's nothing special, and it's a little bizarre in some places, but it's growing on me.

First up: the bathroom, because it's currently the only room that is picture-worthy (all the pictures hung, freshly cleaned, etc.).  :)

The bathroom is really small - just big enough to turn around in.  The fixture above the mirror doesn't switch off (the switch seems to go to the overhead light, but it doesn't work).

This is the bathroom sink.   You can't really see it in this picture, but it's held onto the wall by caulk that's about an inch thick.  Safety first.

Why is there a towel rack right above the toilet?  I have no idea, but we hang our towels elsewhere.  :)  See the old radiator?  Those are all over the apartment.   Also, there is no cabinet in the bathroom to store extra toilet paper, shampoo, etc., so I stack the paper in this little basket.

These pictures hang above the toilet and the radiator.  :)  The one on the left is my family tree, and the one on the right is the first picture we bought when we got married.  You can also see partly where we hang the towels.

The shower curtain always looks pretty with the sunlight behind it!  The shower itself is a deep old one, with tile on the walls (like there is on all the other walls :) ).  The window in the shower has a deep window sill, which we use to store shampoo and other shower supplies.

Justin bought me this towel rack for my birthday.  :)  Isn't it pretty?  We hang our robes on the hooks along with some extra bath towels and hand towels.

And there you have it: our bathroom.  Not glamorous, but it works.  :)

We're Here!

Our move, thankfully, went smoothly two weekends ago (the end of June).  It took ages to load the truck even though we had plenty of willing helpers who worked hard all day long, but it only took two hours to unload the truck.  I guess unloading is just easier!

Once we actually got all of our furniture and boxes moved in, the real fun started.  The apartment was completely filthy, covered in some sort of sticky grime coated with dog hair (yuck).  All of the windows and the back door were nailed and screwed shut -- I'm assuming this is because they don't lock.  The front door didn't latch or lock, either, and there was no fire extinguisher.  We took care of the safety issues immediately, before we unpacked a single box.  There are quite a few other problems, too, mainly with plumbing and oddities of old houses (for example, the bathroom light doesn't switch off).  Our landlord has been understanding of the problems and took care of the big ones (like replacing the front door and fridge) right away, though we are still waiting for some of the littler ones to be handled.

The other fun thing that happened was that we didn't have any internet for two weeks because Comcast is ridiculously disorganized and their customer service is terrible.  Unfortunately, they are by far the cheapest (and fastest) option in the area.  I have the internet on my computer, but we're still waiting for wireless and to be able to hook up Justin's computer.

On the bright side, the apartment is now deep-cleaned and completely unpacked.  That's the benefit of having nothing to do except clean and unpack.  :)  We also went to the DMV yesterday and got out in 30 minutes, which was pretty miraculous considering that we had to renew my license, change Justin's license from AL to WV, and register a car in WV.  We then went to the bank, where they were very helpful and quick.

We still need to get the car inspected and figure out why the post man keeps leaving notes on our mail saying that our address is wrong, but we're mostly settled now.  I'll post pictures soon of our

Also, the weather is great here.  It's 9am and it's only 68 degrees outside.  :)