A Whirlwind

I started to write this post in February, so will leave what I wrote and add to it a bit--it's April 9th, no matter what the post date says--

I haven't been writing much, but these past few weeks have been a whirlwind of all abode activity.

I was afraid I would jinx our luck if I wrote too much when we were actually making progress, but I'm fairly confident now that we'll actually get in, so here's the update.

It's been four months since we started negotiations on our apartment, and eight months since we started looking for real estate in New York, but on Monday, we will be totally into the place. The sellers moved out last Friday, we spent Friday night on aerobeds in the apartment (I INSISTED on sleeping there at least one night just to actually be in), then Saturday morning at 9, our painters arrived. They finished yesterday, my mom and I spent six hours cleaning today, and we have a truck and our elevator booked for Monday. D. and I got rid of the old, moldy air conditioning units this morning (between that and my four hours of window cleaning today, we now ACTUALLY can see out of our amazing windows). The painters pulled up the BR carpet and got rid of some bad shelving. I have lots of 'before-and-after' photos, but -- after all the work we did today -- it looks even better, so I'll have to take new photos before I post them.

The paint job is great, though. We stuck with some of our original plans that Benjamin Moore suggested, and modified others.


--So that was what I wrote and basically everything did work out well. We had a few snags, though. First, our painters apparently kept getting in trouble with the co-op board for such ghastly infractions such as working on President's Day (I mean, it's not Christmas or Yom Kippur), walking in the front door and not the service entrance, and parking in the building's lot "not once, but multiple times" (-from the Board hate-letter we recieved). Of course, they did not let us know this until we were fined, but that's besides the point...
Our other snag came on move-in day. After our wedding, we used many of our Crate & Barrel gift cards to buy the world's most comfortable couch. What makes it so comfortable? It is huge and overstuffed. Did it fit in the elevator of our 1940's building? No. Did my dad and D. try to bring it up the fire stairs? Yes. Did it fit? No. Did they break a light in the stairwell trying? Yes. So my dad and D. got obsessed with fixing this, and my dad found us all of these 'couch doctor' companies who take apart, move, and put back together couches (apparently this is a very common problem in New York buildings). My idea was to trade couches with my parents - so we ended up using my (free and not so crazy) idea, took a couch from their porch, and left our couch there. Frankly, I think each couch suits its new spot, but D. is still a little sad. But we'll get our couch back whenever we have a place for it. The end.
We also got - not in trouble - but - whined at by our super a lot during the move in weeks. We'd tell him we were bringing in a couch and he said "you have to let me know in advance" (well, we were doing that now...). We didn't schedule our carpet delivery or our CB2 furniture delivery enough in advance, blah, blah, blah. But since then, we haven't heard a peep from him. He was pretty intimidating at first, but I think he was more confused by us than anything (we may be the first people in the history of the building who didn't hire professional movers or a cleaning service). D., my dad, and I worked on taking out the beastly air conditioners ourselves, and we think his disappointment in us was just that we didn't have a great need for him. I think a lot of the other residents contract him to do work, so he's probably making a pretty penny under the table that we're not so much good for.

While we don't have our basement storage yet, wedo have bike storage; we're getting mail, though the previous owners' names are still on the mailbox. I can't wait to go to the May annual meeting and vote against the whole board!