Progress!

So our new furniture is really making our place look nice. Today our dining room table arrived! Isn't it beautiful?


And the guys who delivered it assembled the whole thing before bringing it into the house. Thank goodness, because we spent all of our time this week assembling our new bedroom. Our new giant dresser is filled and ready to go.


And we have some sweet new curtains, and isn't our bed great?


But the main attraction, of course, is the wardrobe. Unfortunately, we don't have doors yet (IKEA was sold out) but MAN it's nice to have our clothes in our actual bedroom.


And it's huge, so we can actually have a lot of clothes in there. All nicely organized and (hopefully) minimally wrinkled... bring on the workday.

Next stop: living room. Hopefully in the next month :)

Overambitious part two

So after the family took off, Chad and I had to decide what to do with the rest of the day. Oh I know, let's drive to Ikea, rent a van, and buy a ton of furniture that we will have to assemble!


In our defense, we have been planning to do this for a long time, but it's still pretty intimidating to have our living room filled with boxes again.

First stop on our matching furniture train: the bedroom. We bought a bed, a big dresser, and a giant wardrobe to help with our lack of bedroom closet space.


I am standing in the wardrobe in this picture, and can barely reach the top. It is TALL. I am excited. :)

We also managed to assemble the bed and enough of the dresser to be able to stand it up.


I guess the drawer assembly will have to wait until later this week. After that, the clothes actually move into our bedroom! We'll be like real adults with our clothes in our bedroom!

Dinosaur Story

This weekend we had a great visit from Chad's folks and Christopher. I'm not sure when this happened, but at some point Chad and I became those boring relatives that don't have any toys or good books. Shortly after arriving Christopher decided it was time to read a book and picked up the first one he found.






Please observe how the book seemed to be equally as interesting upside down (no comment on how accurate Christopher's opinion on this book is).

Since we didn't have any good toys or books or movies, we had to entertain ourselves by making up stories about dinosaurs and taking pictures of the cat. You can see how excited she was about a visit from a 3 year old (while very nice, they tend to be generally louder and more unpredictable than adults).


We went to the academy of natural sciences (aka Philadelphia's museum of natural history) to see the dinosaurs. LOTS of things to look at. VERY exciting. :)


Also we got to see some butterflies. The butterfly garden was neat because the butterflies just aren't scared of us at all.


Apparently the day in the city was tiring, and the excitement of taking the train wasn't enough to keep us all awake...


But overall I think everyone had a good time. We even had time for grilling with perhaps the most food we've ever had on the grill at one time.


(notice the salt potatoes on the side burner, corn and speedie chicken on the grill... man I love our grill).

Thank you again to Dave and Bonnie for driving all the way down here for a great visit!

Dinner time

Or at least dinner table time. After much searching we decided on this one, seen here on the JC Penny sales floor. Stay tuned for pictures after it has found it has been delivered and set up in our house. Yay!

Because man can not live by speedie chicken alone

And we really really love our new grill, and I bought the world's largest zucchini at the Ambler Farmer's market today.... grilled zucchini pizza's! Actually they were less like pizza and more like grilled zucchini parmesan. Fun and yummy at any rate.


This was my first time to the Ambler Farmer's market. Notice how I say Farmer's, not Farmers'. This is because the market consisted of one farmer, selling vegetables, and one lady, selling baked goods. Not too impressive in terms of size, but the was fresh corn and beautiful tomatoes. And that's good enough for me!

Overambitious

So the other night I decided it was time to paint the trim in our bedroom. I painted the room back in the first two weeks we lived here, but we never got around to the trim... so Monday night I decided it was the night.

It seems that Monday night I also forgot how long it takes to paint anything. Apparently I learned nothing in that month I spent painting our house. And the month since that I've been working in house paint. Turns out the stuff takes time to dry. Huh.

At any rate with Chad's help we were able to finish it up the next night, with minimal interruption to our lives.

In other news, congratulations to Max for the largest free-roaming fur ball I've ever seen. Nice job Max.

Consider us gardeners!

This weekend Dad and Melanie came to visit, and helped us set up the garden on the side of our patio, and back against our back wall. This is the first time we've been responsible for a garden, so this is quite exciting for me. :)

The side garden started with mom's vision and hard work, digging up the plot. We picked up some tools (now we own a shovel!) and flowers at Home Depot, and picked up some great plants (yay azaleas) at the Spring House Nursery. It was surprisingly easy to put them all in, and now we've got a great little space at the edge of our patio.

The plants are, from left to right: grandifora, deleware valley white azalea, oriental lilly (with chrysanthemums around it), another azalea, black-eyed-susans, one more chrysanthemum, rhododendron. Great, huh!

Oh look, what's that attractive (or at least not horribly offensive) bit of fencing at the back of the yard?


It's our new compost!


Just to give some context to how long I've waited for this, I take you back to the volleyball party I hosted in the beginning of May at our apartment in Somerville. The subject of composting comes up:

Rachel: Oh yeah - we're going to have a back yard, so we can have a compost! I am so excited to have a compost!
Everyone else: Laughs excessively
Tony: Zim, you may be the only person I know who is "so excited" about having a compost
Everyone else: Laughs excessively.

At any rate, now we have a compost. We stained the fence pieces and 2 x 4s we were going to use as posts the day before, and let them dry overnight. In the morning, we set in four metal posts, and wrapped chicken wire around them, to hold in the actual compost. Then dug some holes and set the front two wooden posts, and hung the front fence panel. We didn't hang the side panel (boxing the compost in with wooden fencing), so we would be able to get the compost out and put it on our garden someday. While this looked ok, it didn't seem as nice as it could be.

Chad came up with an ingenious solution to this problem - when he was digging up the compost area, he found an old cement footing (from some long-ago post) , and set that in the ground next to the compost. We hung the side fencing panel on one 2 x 4, which fit into that cement footing, and wedged it in place with a piece of brick (also found by digging in the dirt). This means we can just lift up the side panel and set it aside whenever we want to dig up some compost. And now the gross stuff is all boxed, in, so the compost is very neat.


You may also notice in the earlier picture of the back wall (5 pictures ago), that there are some new hostas planted there. I have no idea where they came from. Or at least I can assure you they were totally not stolen from our neighbor's overgrown hostas, as a loosely justified payment for weed-wacking their side of our sidewalk. Though if they HAD been stolen, perhaps an angry hosta god would explain their sorry state later in the afternoon...


Hopefully they'll perk up with some sun and water.

At any rate, it was a great weekend. We had a great time just sitting outside and visiting, so we're especially excited to have such a nice space to do that in. Thanks again to Dad and Melanie for a wonderful visit and all their help!!!

Nightmare on slug street

Would you believe that thing is a slug? Not a snake, or some kind of medium-sized fish... a slug. The more horrifying part is that we found them on the steps going down to the basement (INSIDE) not outside on the lawn with the small (only 1") slugs. I guess these guys came inside when the rain flooded their regular outside home (please, let them have a regular outside home that is not inside our house)....


I just hope the giant queen slug doesn't come looking for them...

Chad = my hero

Here he is, fixing our hose attachment in the dark. Actually, the crappy flash makes it look darker than it really was, but the point is now we have a hose. Attached to the house. And when we turn it on water comes out (only in the place we expect it to) and we can use it for things. Yay. :)



Also tonight Chad installed a valve between the gas hookup to the house and the grill, so we can turn the gas on and off outside. So hopefully now our house will be even less likely to blow up.


All in all, a very productive evening. :)

I heart weekends

When you don't work on the weekends, you can get so much done! This weekend we had friends over for dinner, met our new neighbors, worked on our fence (see yesterday's post), went running, called into the money show for investment advice, went for a hike in Fort Washington State Park, went to Home Depot to buy a weedwacker, and watched "Lady in the Water" and all of the associated extra features. All this and plenty of time to lay on the couch and watch trading spaces with the cat.

For your viewing pleasure, a few shots from the state park. Here is Chad about to show off his inner ape man by swinging on a giant vine.


Unfortunately this did not go very well for the vine. Better luck next time, Tarzan.

Fence!!! part deux

Today we finished the work on last week's fence, and stained it. Painting a fence with stain is not like painting a big wall, as I had hoped it would be. There are all these extra boards and posts to paint around on the back of the fence, and the boards on the front of the fence aren't really straight so the roller doesn't touch the whole surface. And in our case, there are trees.


The thing that is similar to painting walls is I manage to make a huge mess of myself. Except with stain it looks less like I'm dirty and more like I have some kind of horrible skin disease...


The good news is that while painting a fence takes longer than painting a wall, it isn't really more difficult and after a few hours in the sun our fence looks frigging awesome. And sealed! Bring on the rain. :)


You can see the difference here:

Sleepy time

Our softmore year in college, someone gave Chad a full bed for free. We've been sleeping in it ever since. I'm guessing the thing is ~20 years old. We've been talking about getting a new bed forever, so the other day we went to sleepy's ready to buy and got ourselves a great new comfy queen sized bed. They were supposed to deliver it on Thursday, and we were very excited that they would deal with bringing it to our house and carrying it upstairs. So imagine my surprise when I got home and found this in the dining room...


They couldn't get it up the stairs. Sigh. So we had to take a our banister back off (actually, just the long piece that goes all the way up the stairs) so we could lift the box spring up to the second floor. After all we went through to get that banister up in the first place. Sigh.

While I was pretty pissed that we had to do it, it turned out to not be as big a deal as I had feared, and within an hour or so we had the banister back connected and the bed upstairs. And with a bit of paint touch-up by the next morning the banister was as good as new. And we have an awesome new bed in our room.


(we have the plastic underneath it so it doesn't scratch the floor, since we don't have a frame yet).