Cardboard Chaos

As of about 10:30 AM Friday morning, we are now officially homeowners! We've given the previous owners until Wednesday to get everything moved out, so we still can't get in there and get started. So, you know what that means! More packing! Thankfully, Ken is letting us stay in the apartment until the second week of September, so we can move at our own pace. Painting will come first, though, starting this coming weekend.

Since Jenn said we don't have any pictures of our apartment, I took some time last week and got some shots of every nook and cranny of this place. Now, of course, we were in the middle of packing last week (and still are) so the apartment is somewhat of a mess. Actually, that's a massive understatement. Still, I refuse to hold anything back or contrive some pretty falsehood to make this documentation of our move look presentable. To use a now ancient hip-hop description, I'm "keeping it real".

Let's start in the living room. Here's the view from where I'm sitting now:


The DVD shelves have been cleared, but the TV stuff is still put together. That's a necessity that will only be moved at the last minute. I guess the sword should be packed...haven't really thought about that. Meh, I'll just toss it in the car for one of the trips back and forth.

On the right is the front door and that opening on the left is the hallway to the bathroom & bedroom.





Now, I'll turn to the left....



That room over there is the dining room/office. Notice the Guitar Hero box is still accessible. You never know when you might need to rock out at a moment's notice. The PS2 is packed, but in such a way as to be easily un-packed in just such an emergency.










Let's get a closer look at the dining room/office....


This is the "dining room" half of the room. All the fancy glasses and china are now packed up in those boxes on the shelves. The table is my parent's old kitchen table from back before they got their kitchen re-done. That cabinet on the right was pretty convenient for storage, etc.









Let's see the "office" half of the room....

There's my dual-monitor PC (all ready for video editing just in time for me to have no time to use it). I had to have somewhere to put my anime wallscrolls. I don't watch much anime anymore, but Cowboy Bebop continues to be the best series I've ever seen.










Let's turn a little more to the right to see the rest of the "office"...

Not much else to say about this that isn't obvious upon first glance. More anime and geeky stuff. And a wine rack.




















I'll turn a little more to the right again to complete the 360 view...


There's the rest of our china, which is now carefully packed away. You can see here back into the living room and there's the entrance to the kitchen. Let's see what kind of mess is in there, shall we?












Here's our little kitchen...though not as little as the one on the 2nd floor in this building. The stove is a pretty nice size and there's an actual dishwasher!!! That's something we'll need to get for the house ASAP. Until then, it's paper plates and red cups all the way!
















Let's step in and get a closer look...

Now there's a familiar sight. A sink full of dishes. Like I said, these pictures will show it like it is, pretty or not.

Notice the big old picture of my niece Paige on the fridge. I believe that was left in the apartment when my sister's mother-in-law moved out. It's a cute picture, so we figured we'd leave it up.















If we turn to the left, we'll see the back door...

Or half of it, anyway. That's the door we use most, since we park out back. The bar that holds that curtain there keeps bending more and more and we can't figure out why. Weird.



















Let's take another look at the living room...

Yeaaahhhh, look at that! And to think we still keep running out of boxes. This was last week and it actually looks a little more organized now...but not much.

At least the window treatments still look nice. I'm sure Jenn has plans for them in the house.









Here's a shot from the hallway. Not much else to be said about that.
















Let's turn around and see what this hallway is all about...




































If I could get these pictures to stay side-by-side, you'd get a good idea of how the hallway looks. Sadly, I'm not all that good with web stuff and can't interpret the html code enough to get it to do what I want. ...actually, lemme try a little Photoshop experiment. This should give you better idea....

Close enough. Anyway, there it is. I'll now turn around so you can see the other parts of the hallway...

The trumpet there was once Jenn's grandfather's (on her mother's side). It's pretty cool and obviously pretty old. There's even a band aid patching up one part of it!



















Let's get a closer look at it from the dining room...

You can see into the bedroom a little here. The bathroom is on the right side of this part of the hallway.




















This picture of Jenn was drawn by a man on the streets of Salzburg, Austria during her trip to Europe in high school, 1994. Pretty damn good. It cost about $30 in francs or marks or whatever they used in Austria back then.








Let's take a look at the bathroom, then....

If anyone's seen "Clerks: The Cartoon Show", you may recognize the Bear Who Drive Car. "Who is driving?Ohmygod, Bear is driving.How can that be?!" Good stuff.

After all that talk about not holding anything back, I'm gonna have to break my own rule. You won't be seeing the turquoise bathtub. Not only is the color just plain wrong, it's also not that clean at this point.






Here's some more of the bathroom...

It's a little small, I guess, but it gets the job done. Again, it's nowhere near as small as the one on the 2nd floor here. Yikes!













And now, the bedroom.....

Wow, what a mess! Notice the exercise machine. It doubles as a clothes hanger!! We really got our money's worth out of that thing! We do actually use it from time to time, but obviously not enough.












Here's what it looks like from the machine's point of view...

Holy crap! I thought that first picture was bad! It's a nice deep closet back there, which is good since it's one of only two closets in the whole apartment.













Wait a minute, what's that fuzzball in the closet?

Raven is an opportunistic cat. She's normally not allowed in the closet, which is why she gets in there whenever she gets a chance.

I'm not really what you'd call a cat person, but I gotta admit she's really well behaved...yeah, ok, and cute.










Here's a few pictures of the bedroom taken from the closet:









































...and from the bed...

I was able to pack all those stuffed animals into one box! Good for me. On the right, you can see half of one of my grandfather's last paintings. It's a nice desert landscape that I had requested. I have a few of his paintings and his old piano to help keep his memory alive in our house.










And to complete the 360 view of the bedroom, here's the hallway view from the bedroom...


So there's the real (dirty) tour of our apartment in the middle of the throes of an ecstasy of packing and disorganization. This is pretty much how everything stands right now. On Wednesday, I'll make sure to take some pictures of the house, since it'll be the first time we see it completely empty. My brother Bill will show me how to run a water line to a fridge with an ice maker that night, so that may make for some interesting photos. The fridge gets delivered on Thursday and we should be buying the paint on Thursday or Friday to prepare for the painting party on Saturday.

Keep an eye out here for more updates!