February?!

It feels like 2016 just GOT here! The biggest news in these parts is home improvement!

I got air conditioning installed in my house yesterday. It felt scary deciding to do this - it's a fair chunk of change, and people are doing Things to my house that I don't totally understand, and Something Could Go Wrong - but I contacted four companies, met with the two who got back to me, and chose the bid I liked best.. and here we are. AC-having.

The good news is (and it's worth stating) - I have the money to pay for it. I HAD been saving for a deck but decided this would do more for my summer comfort, and is probably better for resale too. It's weird - traditionally Portland wasn't a place that needed AC but .. climate change is real, and we've had way too many 90+ and 100+ degree days these last few summers. The other good news is that I got 2 new credit cards to charge the project to, so I'll pay for the project AND get two 50,000-mile chunks added to my flight plans.

Other home improvement projects: finally finishing a paint job on a wall in my office (though my friend is advocating I paint a second wall too... will it never end?!?) (and yes.. there is more progress than in the above shot); swapping out some light switches and outlets (under my boyfriend's experienced guidance, but he did a great job telling me what I was doing and letting me do it all myself); next up: light fixtures.

Do you KNOW how many light fixture options there are in the world??? ....

Before-during-after: bed!

My bedroom project is nearing completion. It is certainly at a point at which I can stop for a long time. I do still want to add an area rug or two, real bedside tables instead of the small table and rolling stand I'm using, different curtains, art on the walls, and probably a different desk. BUT I am done with the bed and no mistake!

For a few months I had just a bedframe, no headboard:

I've actually had the headboard in a box in my room all week, but no time to attach it to the bed. Today I improvised a way to hold up the bed with the headboard removed:

And got the headboard in place. Huzzah! I can't wait to go read in bed tonight.

In fact I think I will go to bed quite early - I am fighting off a case of the blahs, and have to get up before the crack of dawn tomorrow so I can go to Monterey and learn to scuba in the ocean. I'm kind of dreading it and will be glad when this learning nonsense is behind me. But at least I'll sleep well in my lovely bed!

Excavation

Project Bedroom continues. I spent a year fretting about how to get rid of my bed frame and mattress, and managed to do both (with the help of friends!!) in November and February. I spent a lot of time between July and February getting rid of the other non-bed bedroom stuff, so after the mattress was gone I was pretty close to a clean slate.

Next was buying a new mattress - I opted to buy a latex foam mattress from a local shop that has some rather old-school notions of doing business: no deliveries, no returns. Again, with the help of friends I got the mattress up the three flights of stairs to my apartment.

Finally, I bought and assembled a bed frame - I got it from the same place I got my mattress, and got just the four-sided no-headboard model, figuring I can upgrade and get a headboard some other day.  No matter my pangs re: headboards and lack thereof, it IS a delight to be in a bed again, after a couple of months of sleeping on a mattress on the floor!

I've had some cause to regret my lack of method in mattress shopping. I am a very decisive but also somewhat lazy person, and part of that means I make a choice and move on, rather than comparing a number of options for a period of time. In other words, I didn't bother shopping around. Instead, I bought a mattress that was very comfy in the store but hasn't been perfect at home. I think it is slightly too firm and will relax over time; for the meantime I've purchased a mattress topper to soften it up for now. My back is still not 100% happy but at least I've stopped thinking about it obsessively! (I'm sure my friends are happy not to hear about it daily.)

I ordered an area rug from Crate and Barrel in early February, but it's back-ordered until May, which is a huge bummer. I haven't really gotten to thinking about curtains and artwork. Actually I HAVE thought about artwork - I'd love to hang my GGB picture above my bed, but am too paranoid in this land of earthquakes to have a heavy glass-covered object over my head at night.

Anyway, the next thing to conquer is bedside tables - right now I'm just piling stuff up on the floor by my bed! I felt a bit like a sociologist this morning, when I examined the pile and thought about what it might say about me. Currently my bedside heap consists of:

• book of crossword puzzles & mechanical pencil; 
• two books from the P.G. Wodehouse series Jeeves & Wooster; 
• two library books; 
• a container for earplugs (even containing a pair of said plugs); 
• box of kleenex left over from when I had a cold in February; 
• two or three magazines that I've finished reading but want to write down some information from before passing them along to my friend. 
• and a lamp, of course!

I spent over an hour in IKEA today and didn't find what I was looking for, bedside-table-wise, so I might just borrow from my living room for a while and figure it out later. But my parents are visiting in April and I'd like to have something on each side of the bed by then!

before and after

Bless IKEA and their consistent sizing! I bought a bookshelf from them probably 12 years ago; last month I bought some doors to put on the bookshelf. Absolutely no problems, and it looks GREAT. Wow, what a difference. I pulled a billion cds and miscellaneous crap from the shelves, and stashed a bunch of glassware and booze there instead.

Before (in the far right-hand corner)

 

After:

Close-up:

  

It looks very grown-up! Of course I'm left with the question of the cds. For now I'm going to put them in a closet. One day I may get an ipod big enough to hold all of their music, but truthfully, I haven't touched most of them in a decade or more. I could get rid of them tomorrow and never know what I was missing. 

post-travel settling-in

I'm back on the West Coast after a lovely and fairly uneventful trip to Rhode Island for Christmas! The biggest excitement was when my dad turned too widely into the snow-choked driveway and got stuck, hanging out into the neighborhood street. Fortunately it's always a quiet street, and there was no one out at 8pm on that Sunday night, so we went inside for dinner and called AAA (after some futile pushing and heaving, involving me, my dad, my mom, and my sister!).

Now I've got a day to settle back in before I resume my working life. It's tempting to try to run around to a bunch of stores and hit any holiday sales that may be on, but I'm also enjoying being in my own little slice of the Bay Area and not mixing with civilization as a whole.

an aside: I'm mulling over adding a bit of (ha! I should say: still more!) storage for kitchen stuff, but this time it's going to have to spill over into my living room. I think I want a cabinet with solid doors to store things like my liquor, wine, wine glasses, crock pot, Dutch oven, cookie sheets, Bundt pans.. I even have a place to put this storage - I just don't know what I want. And I don't think I can bring myself to hit IKEA today, so it will wait.

a second aside: Every time I add to my now-copious stores of Stuff, I realize I'm less and less likely to chuck it all and travel the world. Truthfully, I think I'm a bit too much of a homebody to EVER do that, but it is something I think about whenever I acquire yet another thing. Of course stumbling onto my Most Excellent Apartment when I moved here has already dictated that I won't stick my stuff in storage and go on a long trip in-between jobs. Traveling without paying rent/mortgage back home seems ideal, but at present, I don't see that happening.

back to the main post: I've so far accomplished two of my time-honored post-travel rituals: first, I've exploded my bags into my living space. The second ritual is to go out for breakfast for one last hurrah before I resume cooking for myself. I did it when I got back from my three-week trip to Ireland & Scotland this spring, too: even though I was SO happy to be in my space, and was looking forward to cooking, I had nothing on hand and wanted breakfast. I remember knowing I was really ending my vacation, and I almost went for Fancy Breakfast at the Spanish restaurant, but at the last minute didn't want anything complicated. I also really wanted an American Breakfast after three glorious weeks of non-standard breakfast fare. So today, I did what I did that day in May - walked around the corner to the neighborhood cafe, and ordered the Pancake Special: 2 pancakes, 2 eggs (fried, over hard), and 2 strips of bacon - with coffee, and water. Bliss.