Moving In

This weekend, we moved into our new apartment down in Bridgeport.  By moved in, I mean we have been living here for a month with only half of our belongings, and Saturday we rented a truck to bring the rest over from my apartment in Logan Square.  It's exciting that just a few extra pieces of furniture can turn a place from feeling like an apartment into feeling more like home.  It's nowhere near perfect, but we're making progress a little at a time. 

The apartment itself is a little bit of a fixer upper, but we knew that.   The day we visited, we saw the apartment for its potential and turned a blind eye to all of the tiny (and some not so tiny) details that would reveal themselves to us upon moving in.  We were lured in by the large living spaces, 3.5 bedrooms (an office for each of us!), the low rent, and the lenient pet policy since our family includes 2 cats and a dog.  Crazy, I know.  What we got was a very large apartment and a long list of projects.  Some easy, and others not so much.  

Just a short list of what we're dealing with:

-The kitchen is huge, but has about 12 inches of usable counter space, 50% of which is being taken up by the coffee machine, and the cabinet placement makes using the sink nearly impossible.  

- The bathroom is just plain hideous.  I mean, look at that picture.  What you don't see is a yellow ceramic tile wall climbing up about 5 feet and an uneven tiled floor.  

-Crayon on the walls in some of the bedrooms. 

-Light switches that flip up to turn off and down to turn on.  I will never get used to this. 

It all translates to one thing - we will be spending quite a bit of money at Home Depot over the next few months.  It's a lucky thing we had a sense of what we were taking on when we decided to move into this place.  We have our ever growing list of projects, and (at least at the moment) we are still excited to solve the problems we face to make this place completely ours.