6 Weeks in our Life: You're lucky if there's toilet paper in the bathroom.

The past six weeks have been very busy for us. I counted that in the weeks since we moved into our house in Durham, we have had ten (10) different people stay with us. We also squeezed in a 9-day journey to the beach with Brad's family. So, you can probably imagine the state of our house for the past month. It was only after the last round of guests that I actually got a bedskirt put on the guest bed. Don't even talk to me about the bonus room...Brad's office side of the bonus room is pretty well put together, but my part of the room- the sewing machine/craft side- is really frightening. There is no telling when that will get resolved. There are still a couple of boxes that need to be unpacked, but the problem is that I need to reshuffle a couple of closets around so that I can put more stuff in them...the stuff from the boxes, in fact. What a conundrum. Most days turn into me frantically saying, "WE HAVE TOO MUCH STUFF! WE NEED TO THROW AWAY EVERYTHING!" Brad usually talks me out of that.

I think I've written about the quirks of our Boston apartment, things like our sound-proof room and the faux rock wall. I thought I'd tell you a little about our new place. First, I should wax eloquent about how much we love our new house. We have a PARKING PAD that fits both of our cars. This means NO SCOURING FOR PARKING SPOTS when we get home. Or parking a mile away (in a literal sense). It's awesome. 

Also, 4 bathrooms. Two full and two half. Four toilets. And, there are only two of us that are toilet-users currently. That quadruples the number of toilets we had in Boston. If we ever get a stomach bug at the same time, we are set. We live in the lap of luxury, for sure.

We have a guest room. To all of our friends who visited us in Boston and slept in our "guest room," we invite you to re-visit us in Durham. We can offer you a real bed. With no weight-bearing column right square in the middle of your room. How fun would that be for everyone? 

In a similar vein, Claire has a real room. To those of you who never visited us in Boston, you might not have known that Claire's room was, shall we say, "multipurpose." It served as her room, the guest room, a storage room, and the walkway to the basement/laundry room. It was sound proofed (don't worry- we used monitors and regular check-ins to make sure everything was safe) and did, in fact boast a weight-bearing column in the middle of the room. That column, combined with the wraparound, built-in desk, made turning that room into a more functional bedroom nearly impossible. Oh, and the fact that it was our pathway to the laundry made things complicated. We "decorated" her room a smidge to make it feel jolly and happy, but there was no way around the fact that it wasn't a real room. So, it is nice to have a proper room for her. Although, I will say, our Boston experience made me realize just how not significant an adorable nursery is; she surely didn't care, and we were able to function just fine. 

In Durham, we also have a washer and dryer. That we don't share with anyone and that we don't have to pay quarters to use. This is amazing and quite possibly my very favorite thing about living here (it's a tie with the parking space). I love it. I can do laundry whenever I want, however many times a week I want. And, I can dry any and everything. (In Boston, I would do two loads of laundry per week- one light and one dark. I would then combine the things from both loads that I most wanted to dry in the dryer, and everything else air dried. I truly hope I never take laundry for granted again.) 

Some other favorites about our new place: our neighborhood is lovely (the plants around here are gorgeous), we are in a great location for getting most everywhere (including Duke, which is very important), and we have a back deck. It's just a super great place to live.

Some of the quirks of our place are really interesting. For example, we have an area off of our kitchen that we refer to as our "coffee bar." We aren't entirely sure exactly what it was originally intended for, but it kind of looks like a large wet bar (without the sink...because the sink is about 6 feet away). The counter section of the "bar" is kind of odd, as it's not really quite deep enough for stools. The whole thing is cordoned off with a set of low-hung, saloon-style swinging doors. We eventually plan to remove them, but for now, they keep the bear out of that area.

On the wall behind the coffee bar is a massive mirror. It's probably 9' by 5'. Or something around there. It gives the illusion that our living room (that it faces) is HUGE. Claire loves it. We have gotten used to it. Need a hair check? Just step over to our coffee bar.

Another quirk is that we have no pantry. I never really paid attention to the fact that the two other places we have lived as married folks have had dedicated pantry space. I didn't have any in Ukraine, but I guess I forgot about that over the past four years. So, we actually turned quite a few of the cabinets in the coffee bar into pantry space. It's really handy, although not ideal, as you sort of have to stand on your head to get to the lower shelves. I've decided to squat every time I need something and turn the whole thing into an exercise.

Our kitchen is incredibly tall, which we love. It has those chic sunken lights and pretty crown molding...and the cabinets go reallllly high. For most of the cabinets, we store infrequently-used serving pieces, but one of the cabinets is used as pantry space, so I literally have to get out the step ladder to reach some of our food. Fortunately, there is an odd, 6" space between the edge of the kitchen cabinets and the coffee bar, so I can stash it there.

I'll try to get some pictures of our house up for you sometime. Things are mostly in there proper places (outsides of the bonus room and various walls where we haven't hung art yet), so it shouldn't be too traumatic for anyone. The question is how quickly I will manage this. I have actually been writing this blog post for four days, but haven't been able to get it finished, thanks to the toddling bear. Sheesh. Parenting is hard. Why doesn't anyone ever warn you? Oh wait...they do...Bless us all.