On Friday, Mom and Dad and I painted living room walls, dining room and living room ceiling, and dining room furniture--namely cubes from Economy Hardware for Christina's (nearly patented) Cubbie and Cube Modular Solution to entry-way clutter. This is what the living room looked like on Friday--full of scrap wood, paint, sawhorses, and Dad's power tools. Then, on Sunday, the cubes were neatly arranged on fresh paper, waiting to be screwed together and mounted to the wall; the floor was swept, vacuumed, and exposed; and the living room was fully painted.
We also spliced some wires--taking a metaphorical page from Robert's electrical book--and replaced the hanging light on the far side of the kitchen with a better-looking, more energy-efficient, higher-wattage light.
When Robert got home from work, Jef in tow, we all went out to Target in Somerville for small miscellaneous housewares and to Tacos Lupita near Porter Square for dinner. The next morning, we hung a curtain over the closet door in the small bedroom, on a new Target curtain rod, because the old bi-fold door there was broken and a new one would have to be custom-made or ripped to fit the 28" opening. The curtain is okay, actually, because in addition to being less work it 1) looks good--crispy and primary-colored, and 2) lets us use the Japanese three-quarter-length curtain that was a wedding present from Michiyo and has been hanging, somewhere, in our apartment ever since.
Robert spent an hour or so repairing the electrical wiring in the big bedroom; things were very strangely wired from the beginning, and his addition of another outlet in the bedroom made the rest of the lights in the room go haywire last week. Everything's fixed now, though, and he actually managed not to shock himself again this week. Here, he stands in the bedroom with his supplies and electrical book.
On Saturday Dad cut additional shelves for me to fit the built-in breakfront/bookcase in the dining room, and I stained them yellow. Our shelves now alternate, yellow/mahogany/yellow/mahogany, in a really striking way. The cross-piece shelf on my cube/cubby system, the shelf with hooks that I'm going to mount on the wall near the door, and my wineglass rack which will hang from the ceiling near the dining room window are also this same color--natural wood stained yellow. It really ties the room together, and when our green, red, and blue chairs are around our black table, with the blue walls and differently blue cubes, it'll be a great effect.
We very laboriously hung Mom's old spicerack on the lime-green kitchen wall. This picture's a much better representation of the color of the kitchen, and the spice rack--oiled and cleaned--is the same shade of wood as the rest of the kitchen woodwork. Mom's had the spicerack since Aunt Elsie, her godmother, gave it to her as a housewarming present in the 1960s, but she hasn't used it for awhile because since 1979 she's lived with a kitchen with less wall space. Anyway, the spicerack reappeared from its basement hideaway, and we were going to mount it quickly, while Dad and Robert were doing other things. Alas, no: like everything else in this house, mounting the spicerack was a challenge and provided an interesting surprise. A steel plate behind part of the diagonal kitchen wall awaited, just where we wanted to hang the rack, and we had to move it over and redrill. In the process, Dad got involved, we broke many nails and screw-holders, and we nearly broke yet another drill bit (this would be our sixth or seventh in the last seven weeks).
On Sunday, Mom and I spent most of the morning at our old apartment packing kitchen boxes with fragile and necessary things, and then Dad and Robert came back and we all moved some boxes over. The entire kitchen, except for a few boxes of wraps and baggies, our rice cooker and toaster oven, a few pots hanging on the wall, and half a dishwasher's worth of dirty dishes, is now packed and mostly unpacked at the new apartment. Nothing's organized at all, but at least it's 1) all there, and 2) mostly all on the shelves and out of boxes. We're going to get it fully unpacked tomorrow or Tuesday, and that way when the movers come on Thursday, everything will be easy to find in the kitchen.
Yes, that's right--we're getting movers. This came about because Aunt Mary called Robert, offered to pay for movers, and pressured him into admitting that his back was aching after two months of hard work every weekend and many evenings. After this weekend, and today's kitchen boxes, I think Robert is especially glad he said yes. So, on Thursday, Gentle Giant comes to the rescue, picking up everything from our old apartment and bringing it to the new one. We spend our first night at the apartment on Thursday, and when Mom and Dad come up on Friday, they'll be staying with us at our new apartment: on Saturday we bought a really nice futon, with a special mattress with coils in it (to make it more bedlike and comfy) and two under-futon storage drawers, and Robert has it almost completely set up in the guest room. Mom took the cover home to Scotchguard it, and I have the linens ready. In the left corner of the picture below, by the way, you can see Robert's monster of a bean bag chair--I bought it for him as a present for the 10th anniversary of the night we met, but it sat in its box in the apartment until this week. We couldn't open it while there was quite so much dust and sawdust and dirt and splinters around, so it took it awhile--about 3 days, actually--to expand to its natural size and shape, once released from its two-month prison of a (much smaller) box. Robert says he's always wanted a bean bag chair, yet never had one until now. He thought he might reach boring middle age without getting the childhood and adolescent chair of his dreams, and I couldn't let that happen.
And finally, here's the bedroom with the final bamboo blinds hung, and a few small items moved in. The window might not look like this forever, though, as we're trying to determine whether we really need the light-cutting stained-glass window sticker I applied behind the shade. We'll give it the test of a sunny morning to see, but in any case, we're ready for the movers, and the end is finally in sight. Dad and Robert did some very small plumbing repairs in the bathrooms, they moved my hand-stained desk into position, they repaired the kitchen tile floor, they grouted and caulked, and they hung moulding around the projector hole in the living room wall. Mom finished cleaning all the floors, old and new, and next week at this time we'll be in our new place!
