I can almost taste victory.
We bought our current apartment over a year ago and moved into it back in January and we have yet to unpack. You might wonder why we’ve been living out of boxes for the last 7 months, but really, it’s no big mystery.
You see, we’ve been doing renovations.
Of course, this is where most of our friends and family throw up their hands in frustration and disbelief. Not because we’re doing renovations, but because we’re doing renovations on what was a completely brand new apartment in a new construction building. Yes, you read that right. We are the very first people to live in this apartment, and the building in which we live was constructed less than three years ago. Nothing was used, everything was brand new. So why did we do “renovations” when it sounds like nothing needed to be renovated?
Well, because as it was the apartment sucked.
The layout was all wrong, with doors everywhere they shouldn’t be, hallways that used up space that should have been better utilized, no usable closet space and a kitchen that was worse than useless. The developer had simply built a building fast and cheap without thinking about how people would actually live in the spaces he was creating. Luckily, HoBiscuit and I are very good at seeing past that kind of stuff, so we ignored the horrible layout and saw that the actual space was wonderful. A duplex apartment with three full bathrooms in New York is almost unheard of! So, looking past its cosmetic flaws we thought we could make it into something beautiful for us to live in. Transforming the apartment from the ugly caterpillar it currently was into the beautiful butterfly we imagined it could be. All it needed was a little work, and some money.
And holycrapyoucannotbeserious amounts of time.
Oh my lord, did we underestimate how long this project would take. We originally thought three months would be sufficient to complete the entire project, but we quickly came to realize that we were so very, very naive. From construction permits, to ordering materials, to unexpected surprises, nothing happened on time or on schedule. It was as if we were cursed by the construction gods and had to atone for our sins by being forever covered in white construction dust. Some of our daily rituals included making the bed every morning by covering it with a plastic tarp, eating every meal (every fricking meal!) at local restaurants because we didn’t have a kitchen for four months, and always wearing some kind of foot covering just in case a stray nail or screw was lying around looking for a foot to penetrate for giggles.
Damn you, 8 penny nail. Damn you to hell.
We had done renovations before, but never like this. And we hope to never do it again. But now, finally, we are nearing the end. This week is the last of the finishing touches on the work already done. And in one month, around the time that the Mighty Baby will be joining us, we should have a brand new stair railing as well. And that will finally end this whole saga and maybe, just maybe, I can stop using this craptastic laptop as my business machine, set up my home office properly and start blogging on a regular basis again.
Won’t that be nice?
Well, you’re actually “NEVER DONE” with home improvement. Trust me, I know. And with Baby G coming, you’ll be doing the “childproof ramba” the next few years. Two words, Electronic Fence.
I was waiting for you to say that after all of that, you were moving next month.