Category: Home improvements

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Awesome Beginnings Being a girl Drew Endings Home improvements Memoir Nonfiction Sentiment Work

The Devolution of an Apartment

Because I missed the boat on having a comprehensive wedding blog (one of my top 5 regrets ever), I have become slightly obsessive about documenting everything just in case it’s important. Most lately, the devolution of our apartment.

Here it is near the beginning of the breakdown. The hutch is (mostly) emptied out but everything is basically still there:

As the hutch and dining room set move out, everything else starts moving around:

The bedroom and my awesome red shelves, now emptied of books. Well, almost:

The living room only seemed to grow more crowded as we packed, despite my giving away 6 bags of clothes/shoes/etc, and 2 boxes of kitchen stuff, and us throwing away tons of trash:

Possibly making some progress? The desk is gone from the bedroom:

The couches, now freed from their restraining covers, move their waterprint patterns out the balcony and over the side (no room to get them out the front door).

Drew blinds me with the dresser mirror. Maybe he’s tired of me taking pictures while he and his dad move the heavy stuff.

So much room!

Yet still so much stuff!

While Drew and his dad drove the couches to the storage, I made it my job to clean off the bed.

I liked to put blinders on and pretend that this was all that was left. Ignorance is bliss.

The truck filled with boxes:

Our stored stuff, filling up the space:

My plan was to open every cupboard and drawer in the kitchen that still had stuff in it, and close them as I emptied them out.

I got some boxes from work with some strange codes on them…

Progress!

Then a break to take pictures. The masks were mostly because I was using Easy Off in the oven, and that stuff is toxic. But then it was fun to just keep them on.

I am really loving this afternoon spent with my head in an oven. So fun.

Actually, this is preferable.

The final day. Seriously, what is all this stuff.

FINALLY! What a giant bedroom.

What a sparkling bathroom.

What an empty living room!

And of course, to say goodbye, San Bruno had to dress up in its finest.

So long, first apartment in our married life! You were a good little apartment! I will think of you fondly!

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Beginnings Being a girl cars Dreams Drew Exercise Food Home improvements Memoir Self improvement

Setting a routine

We’ve been in our new place for a week now. I can now say comfortably that I do not think we made the worst mistake ever moving out of our apartment. (That was a very real fear a couple times there.)

We’ve now had time to settle in, figure out what stuff goes where, and get used to sleeping in a new bed. We’ve each decided which shower we prefer. We’ve cooked meals in the kitchen. This morning I hosted our book club here and we made lunch for our four-person book club. (It was awesome.) (We should entertain more.)

We lived in the other place for over 2 years. I had a routine down. I knew exactly what I did every morning, and while it was a lot of back and forth from the living room to the bedroom to the bathroom to the bedroom, I knew what each step was and there was a very precise reason I did everything in that order.

But I have to kind of start over here. None of my stuff is in the order it used to be in, for one thing. For another, the bathroom where I shower is not the bathroom where I keep the hair dryer and everything. So there’s a lot more back and forth, because after 4 work days I still haven’t quite figured out what my exact routine is. There’s still a lot of, “What am I missing here?” It takes me a little longer to get out the door in the morning. Which is fine, since my commute is about cut in half.

Drew’s commute is about doubled, which makes our commutes about the same length of time now. Which is nice.

The good thing about getting a chance to recreate your routine, is that it allows you to build in some good stuff. I am trying to build the following things into my routine:

  • Healthier eating, specifically snacking – we’ve purchased a lot of fruit in the last week, and I’m also depending a lot on those frozen vegetables that you steam right in the microwave
  • Cooking dinner – in the last few weeks at the old place, we basically gave up cooking anything besides chicken nuggets on a baking sheet
  • Going to the gym on the way home from work – theoretically I can avoid the worst of rush hour if I wait it out in a spin class
  • More walks – it’s so pretty here, and there are lots of places to explore before hitting the library on the way home.

I also want to try to be more of an adult in 2012: meaning, I want to fold my clothes as soon as they’re clean* and make the bed every day and wash dishes as soon as they’re dirty. Honestly, I have less hope for these resolutions than for the others.

It’s fun to remake yourself every January 1st. And I feel like this year we get an extra boost to help facilitate that!

*I’m rolling my eyes as I write this, since I know that every single clothing item I own is freshly laundered but stuffed into a laundry bag on the floor somewhere. I guess I know what I’m doing tonight.

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Endings Home improvements Memoir Nature Sentiment

Ready to be moved already

Every morning this week, when I’ve gotten up and come out to the living room, my first thought is always, “We’ve been robbed!”

I mean, I guess yeah, I would say I’m easily amused.

Although…maybe I’m just going a little crazy here and finding amusement where I can.

Also, having taken out almost all of the furniture, and everything off the walls, we’ve found that our apartment is delightfully resonant. Last night I was going on some little rant about something or other, and I realized in the middle of it that I could hear my voice reverberating in the living room. That had to drive someone crazy. Someone besides Drew, I mean.

It also means I don’t want to yell anything from the bedroom to the kitchen, like I normally would, unless I’m okay with all our neighbors hearing it. And, given that one of my priorities in life is to never be someone that other people eavesdrop on disdainfully, it makes for a lot quieter evenings.

Here are three things I’ll miss: the three cats that live around us. First, there’s Black & White Cat who mostly sits in the grass down the hill from our front door.

Then, there’s Backseat Driver Cat. I can’t remember the full story about him. But I’m pretty sure if you’re not looking, he’ll jump in your car while the door’s open, and then make annoying commentary from the back, like, “Why are you getting on the freeway here?” and “Oh…I would have gone to the other McDonalds.”*

Finally, there’s Ghost Cat. Ghost Cat is primarily seen at night in the fog, and is a swift runner. I took a picture of Ghost Cat but when I developed it, there wasn’t anything there and the inside of my camera was all melted. (Wait, that’s basilisks, not ghosts.)

I have no idea who owns any of these cats (well, I mean, Ghost Cat obviously has no owner). But I’ll miss seeing their tails disappear as they run into the bushes to hide. And I’ll miss Backseat Driver Cat telling me to turn on my headlights, even in the middle of the day.

*Sadly I have no picture of Backseat Driver Cat at this point, because once I made the decision to write a roll call of the Cats around here, he stopped showing up. I believe he’s self-conscious about his orange fur.

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Awesome Beauty Drew Family Fashion Friends Home improvements Love Religion

It’s Christmas in South City!

There’s this neighborhood in South San Francisco, where they must have some kind of agreement or something that you have to sign when you move in, because everyone goes crazy during the holidays. I love it. I aspire to one day live in a place where I’m forced to put up hundreds of dollars of decorations every year so people can come park in front of my driveway and take pictures in my front yard.

Oh, that came out as sarcasm, but I’m totally serious.

Drew, Erin, and I went the other night, but we just drove through and so all my pictures are a little blurry, as Drew was reluctant to stop in the middle of everything and wait for me to get the perfect shot. I had to just magically get it while he was stopped momentarily in the line of cars.

Here are an assortment of – but not all of – those pictures:

The blue house...
...next to the white house
Candy cane fence
One of many Santas riding motorcycles
The best house!

That last house is the best house – it’s one of the first ones you see on your way in and the last one on your way out. It’s the prettiest and the cleanest-looking. There aren’t any weird creepy anamatronics in the windows, and what you can see of the inside of their house is also nice and Christmassy. It’s just the best house of the bunch.

I could have taken my blurry shots and been done with it – and supplemented this blog post with a handmade holiday poem or something – but then last night some of us went out for dinner and on the way back, the one person in the car who you’d expect to be the least excited about Christmas, said, “Ooh! Ooh! Have you seen the neighborhood with the decorated houses? Can we go look at it?”

I mean, that’s just adorable, you have to say yes.

Plus, we had Starbucks, so we were all feeling the holiday spirit.

So we parked and walked around, which means I got slightly less blurry pictures. Although I think that, without a real camera and a tripod, I was never going to get magazine-spread-ready photos. But I mean…cameraphone diaries.

Here are some details I didn’t get during our drive-by visit:

A closeup of the best house, and their tree.
On any other street in any other neighborhood, this house would be amazing. But here, it's like...Okay. What else you got?
I just like the reflection of the house across the street.
A couple years ago, Drew and Erin and I did this, and I had a picture of myself in front of this wreath. Oh yeah, a lot of houses reuse their decorations.
This house goes for quality, not quantity. A real snow globe! These kids were losing their minds!
I just love Nativities.
This is the bear house. They have two of the creepiest trees ever - made all out of bears, held hostage with Christmas lights.
A closeup of the upstairs bear tree...
God knows I tried to take a good picture of us. But I look awkward in all of them. This is the least awkward-looking.
An assortment of characters!
I like the reflections here too
I'm hoping that these people are on vacation or something, and they don't hate their lives.
Mesmerizing
I remember this from last year too. I don't think they're all children. In my head this is a daycare center or something.
Drew likes this tree. He thinks it should be in Downtown Disney or something.
Geese on the roof!

It sure feels like Christmas here – and I can’t wait to see my family tonight and Drew’s family tomorrow! Merry Christmas, all!!

Categories
Beginnings Endings Home improvements

The end of an era

Packing sucks.

Two years and five months ago, Drew and I packed up all out stuff in New York and moved back to California. Since then we have apparently fooled ourselves that we’re minimalist – we are finding that we have A. LOT. OF. STUFF.

Part of that is getting married and getting lots of wonderful wedding gifts. Part of it is trying to get all of our childhood stuffs out of our parents’ houses. And part of it is just the fact that we both like to collect things.

I feel like we’ve been packing and packing and yet it looks like NOTHING has happened in here. I finally just finished packing books. At some point in the last couple years, I have acquired a bookstore. I knew it was getting bad because of the way books were piling up on the shelves on top of and in front of each other. But I didn’t realize it was like, pack for days and have boxes filled with books but still be finding them in random places, bad.

The reason for the packing is that we’re getting out of this apartment – nothing against the apartment itself but it feels like it’s time to move on. It’s starting to feel cramped (see? too much stuff) and there are small annoying things about the complex.

So, we picked out a place in St. Francis Wood, four stories, with a massive driveway and an indoor pool. We move in in two weeks.

Just kidding. (St. Francis Wood is a GORGEOUS neighborhood in San Francisco.)

This place can be yours for $12,000,000!

We’re actually moving a little further down the peninsula, closer to my work. I believe it will be temporary, as we’re both partial to the fog and being closer to the ocean, and this place is on the bay side, where they actually have seasons! I am looking forward to that.

We’re out of here at the end of the month. Two weeks to go! Merry Christmas! Back to packing now.

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Beginnings Being a girl Endings Exercise Home improvements Sentiment

Resolutions

I’ll be revisiting the New Year’s Resolutions concept in a little bit, but for now I’m off work until January 4th, so I’m doing…old-year resolutions.  End-of-the-year resolutions.  In the 2 weeks I have off work, I am determined to accomplish the following:

-Hit the gym 6 times.  It sounds pretty reasonable, but I’ve also booked myself into seeing everyone who’s back in California for the holidays, including 3 overnight trips in Lakeport.  So basically every day I’m not on the road, I’m at the gym.

-Do some deep cleaning of the apartment.  Specifically I want to clean out the fridge, scrub the bathroom, and organize all the stuff that’s just been floating around.  Tonight I unpacked and shelved two boxes of books, so there’s my head start.

-Write another short play to submit to the Samuel French Off-Off-Broadway Play Festival.  Then assemble my applications and send ’em in.

-Organize my iTunes and sync up my iPod.  Since I got my new laptop, I’ve managed to transfer all my music, but I haven’t really done anything to clean it up.  So I’ma tackle that.  Also, I have a list of new songs I want to download, just to make sure I’m up to date with Bruno Mars and Pink.

And tonight I added to that list:

-Manage to make a dinner that makes Drew go, “Mmm!  This is DELICIOUS!!”  He’s been pretty complimentary about the stuff I’ve been making lately, but I want to really impress him.  (At least I know he won’t fake it on me.)

New Year’s Resolutions are being crafted.  Also a confessional post.

Merry Christmas!

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"Other people" Friends Home improvements

Payback

I have kind of a grudge against our upstairs neighbors.  They can be loud, both speaking (shouting?) and stomping.  Plus they have this dog that loves to whine loudly, and run back and forth through the apartment, especially late at night.  For some reason that sound travels right through the floor, which you’d think the carpet would help.  This is not some New York City parquet floor.

Also, their dog definitely goes crazy barking at people when they take him out for walks, which bothers me, because we all lived here first.  We got a flyer from the office on our door yesterday reminding us that everyone needs to pick up after their dogs, and in my mind, I’ve accused the upstairs neighbors of making those flyers necessary.

So on Monday night I was getting uptight because of all the yelling, screeching, and pounding going on up there.  We finally realized it was probably a football thing, which meant it went on for like 4 hours.  Annoying!  Please don’t disturb our 2-hour game of Super Scrabble.

But last night we got sweet sweet revenge, when eight of us piled into our living room to watch (and loudly approve of) the season 2 premiere episode of Glee.  Take that, tough-looking upstairs neighbors.

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Home improvements

Petty theft

Parkmerced Apartments on 19th Avenue in San Francisco has some great signage.  They have four or five stucco marquees with their name on them in individual painted wooden letters, maybe a foot high.  While driving home from Mill Valley through the month of January, I noticed that someone had stolen first the capital P, and then someone (the same person? a copycat?) had taken the a.  Then my working hours changed and to avoid 19th Avenue in rush hour I started going down Sunset Blvd and I haven’t been by Parkmerced in some time.  Tonight on our way back from dinner and Big Bang Theory with Lysandra and Joe, Drew and I drove past the apartments again.  What do you think was missing?  The merced, leaving a sign with Parkmerced on one side and rk on the other.

My only regret is that I missed all the progress, which is really where the humor is, right?

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Home improvements Not awesome

A day of repairs

A week, maybe 10 days ago, I went to lock the deadbolt before going to bed, and stepped on the welcome mat next to the door.  My sock was instantly soaked through.  Upon closer inspection, water was leaking under the door and filling the little area right in front of the door.  We’ve had a lot of rain lately and it’s sounded especially loud right outside the front door, but I guess it’s been coming inside as well.  We kept saying to each other, we have to get this fixed.

A few days later, the front door started splitting – the front and back panels coming away from the frame – leaving splinters of wood and paint all over the (still soaking wet) floor.  We finally made the trek to the office to tell them that we needed a new door.  They sent a guy out who spent all of 3 minutes here, and put some screws in the two panels to keep the door together.  Yay!  We then pointed out the wall by the front door, which the other day formed a huge bubble of water from a leak inside, as well as the ceiling where you can see water stains forming.  He said he’d have to wait for it to dry out and then they would repaint.  (Good luck anything drying out here right now.)

Today two new guys came out and looked at everything.  They radioed the office and called it a “huge mess” and I think once or twice stopped themselves from saying bad words.  (“Hey, look at this.” “Oh, shi….”)  They tore up part of the wall, pulled out all the soggy insulation, disconnected the wiring (did I mention this is the wall with the main light switches and outlet?), and cut a vent in the ceiling so it could dry out and stop storing water.  They promised to come back to shave part of the door: since it’s so swollen, it’s really difficult to get open or closed.  They also made many disparaging comments about the other guy, who didn’t really do anything and also didn’t have us sign anything, so there’s no record of what he did do.

We actually kind of need a new door, I think, especially since we’ve both been having difficulties with getting our keys in both of the locks.

So today ended up being sort of productive, not that we had to do anything, but we did oversee it.

Also today, we took my car’s right front tire to Firestone to get it patched up, after a kind patron at the show yesterday tracked me down and told me I had a flat.  I thought I could put the spare on myself, just to get home, but then Jenn the Production Manager said she’d help.  Then while we were assembling our tools (thank God I have a spare tire and a jack, although no wrench, but she had one in her trunk), Margot the Literary Manager was walking by and stopped to hold an umbrella over us.  Then while I loosened and pried off the plastic “hubcap,” two of the tech guys came walking by after gorging themselves on burritos, and said they didn’t want to get in the way.  I said please get in the way, and then they proceeded to put the spare on.  But I still think if I had to, I could have done it myself.

When I picked up my newly repaired tire today, the woman behind the counter asked if my husband was going to put it on the car for me.  I said, “We’re going to put it on together.”  Then she gave me my receipt and a free wall calendar of Pacifica.  Bonus gift.

Don’t worry, we still had time to watch lots of TV, including The Pregnancy Pact.

Trash bag-covered hole in the wall