You remember these ugly-as-sin/oh-god-not-the-70s mirrors in our living room?



They're gone. We posted them on Craigslist and someone came and took them away the very next day. But they gave us some work to do before they went:



Much plastering, sanding, and painting later, it now looks like the rest of the wall:



And how did our paint colours turn out? Well, let's have some craptastic photos to give you a hint. Here's my dad in our newly painted living room:



Our blurry unfurnished bedroom:



The spare room/office which I can't find a decent angle to photograph from, so this will have to do:



Many thanks to my parents, Jonathan and Linda (and Ada!), Dan, Andrew, Rich, and Cat for helping us paint everything in ONE day!

And then... then we moved furniture in. And then we bought things off Craigslist. And then we went to IKEA. So, furniture. We bought an EXPEDIT bookcase from someone on Craigslist. Regular $170 plus tax, we got it for thirty bucks. Score! However, it was immediately claimed by Dune:



Most of the stuff in our dining room is IKEA. If you're curious: STEFAN chairs ($20!), INGO table (old, to be replaced eventually), EXPEDIT bookcase with LEKMAN boxes in bottom shelves, rug 'borrowed' from Chris's mom, cat chasing a toy, le Chat Noir poster, map of the metro system in Paris.



Our living room went from this:


to this:



LACK coffee table, POANG chair, couch from Sears, BILLY bookcase, LACK sidetable that I just painted from neon blue to dark green, Underwood typewriter from 1913, old rotary phone, rug from Pier 1 from Melissa, track lighting from Andrew.

We still need to install some things in the kitchen (including a breakfast bar!), finish unpacking, and then we're onto larger projects like saving for a washer/dryer unit and tearing out most of the bathroom and installing cabinets that are not falling apart. And then the kitchen. And then, someday, we will be finished and then we will have children and they will destroy it all, if the cats haven't gotten to it first. :)

Finally, a few photos from Christmas. My family decided to pose SAD and then HAPPY:




Chris showing off the "christmas card" I got from Melissa:



And last, but certainly not least, because I threatened to post this online and my father has specifically asked me why it's not up yet, my mother with the sexy underwear she received for Christmas:



C'est tout!

We painted the whole place in ONE DAY, with the help of some fine friends and much beer. :) It looks SO much better than it did with everything white. There's a few more things I need to move over from my place, but after that we're all moved in! It's quite an adjustment to go from a bachelor apartment to a 2 bedroom condo. We have a bedroom and you can actually close the door! Someday we will have a washer/dryer! The cats have windowsills to sit on and mutter at pigeons from!

Today we're going to pick up an Expedit bookcase from Craigslist, for a mere $50 plus paying for a taxi to move it, rather than $169 plus taxes plus however we get it home! Oh, how I love Craigslist (because it first loved me — sing along now, all ye who still have hymns stuck in your head due to countless repetition).

Tomorrow will likely be an actual IKEA trip, which will be both wonderful and insane, as we are going on a Saturday during their Boxing Week sale, so it's guaranteed to be a madhouse in there. But we have need of furniture and our budget is limited, so off we go.

We borrowed a stud finder from Dan, and as a perfect example of the sort of ridiculous humour I have to live with every day, Chris immediately held it against his head, made it beep and said, "See, honey? It ALREADY found a stud!"

So, that interview I had a couple of weeks ago... yeah, I didn't get that. I got the old "your resume is great, you're wicked smart, we love the work you've done for us for the last 3 months, but blah blah blah... need more experience" speech. Oh, and the patronizing "we just didn't feel the position was right for you" line, which is the equivalent of "it's not you, it's me, so let's still be friends, okay?" Hmph.

But tomorrow is a new day, a day of getting keys for our new condo and taking the afternoon off so we can sit in our condo and think, "Holy shit! It's ours!" This next week will be a week of cleaning and painting and packing and moving and entertaining family.

If you are ever considering moving to Brampton, Jim is available to serenade you with a list of reasons why not to. He cannot play guitar, but he WILL. For you. Because life is baaaaaaad... in Brrrrrammmmptonnnnn!

After long debate and too many hours spent with the Benjamin Moore Personal Colour Viewer, we just might have our colours!

This is the floorplan, just for reference. Windows are that way: -->



The bedroom:


We were originally going to paint the accent wall a deep red, but I've been talking to people and hearing horror stories of red kitchens that took three gallons and EIGHT coats of paint just to convince it not to be a splotchy fuchia. We're going to put the bed on the wall with the window, so that wall and the wall facing it will be 'oxford gray', and the others will be 'seaspray'. Right now I feel like the 'oxford gray' might be too light, but everyone tells me that paint looks a lot darker once it's on the wall.

The living/dining room:


We have blue furniture and we won't be having a blue trim, but I wanted to see how the blue would affect the browns. This room is a long L-shape, with the window (balcony) at one end of the L, so there's not any direct light in parts of the room. We wanted something light but not quite white so that it wasn't boring but it still reflected light around. I also want some accent walls, so that will be the 'ginger root' brown.

The office/spare bedroom:


The green will be going on the walls directly around the bed (the room is sort of a weird shape), while the 'seaspray' colour will go everywhere else.

We still have NO IDEA for the kitchen, and the bathroom will have to wait, because we're going to tear a bunch of stuff out of there eventually anyways.

Mmm, pepernoten... The Dutch heritage is making my kitchen smell awfully yummy today. Cinnamon, nutmeg, cloves, ginger... is good, ja? :) I also baked shortbread, which was NOT FUN because it is the crumbliest "dough" I have ever encountered, but I PREVAILED and those at our xmas party tonight better appreciate it!

And now, a quick guide to locating small mischievous felines:

Step One: Locate tail.



Step Two: Locate nose.



Step Three: Kitty!!



Other strategies include Following the Meowing, Patting the Bed Until You Find A Small Breathing Lump, Checking the Laundry Hamper, and Shaking the Bag of Kitty Treats.

It's too bad dimly lit bars aren't better for photography, because that photo is GOLDEN. :)

This is turning out to be the most adult month of my life. Not only have we bought a condo and gotten a mortgage, but because we're not married, we're getting wills, living wills, and trading powers of attorney for property and personal care (lots more info here). It basically just means that if either of us gets hit by a bus and goes into a coma, the other can make decisions about health care and make sure the mortgage gets paid in the meantime. Without those documents, we wouldn't even have the right to be in the other's hospital room if something super-bad happened.

We've also been reading Unmarried to Each Other by the leaders of the Alternatives to Marriage Project in the States. I've been really impressed with it, and managed to read half of it in an afternoon. It's very readable, has tons of citations for further reading, covers a lot of ground, and by this point, I feel like having the authors over for coffee. A lot of the legal stuff in it is different than what we face here (e.g. gay marriage is legal, common law is legal everywhere and works differently, universal health care, etc.). It's interesting to read about so many other people's experiences with cohabitation without marriage and their various reasons for it (or lack of reason to change). I grew up with marriage and while I've never been the "planning her wedding since she was five" type of girl, I think I've always assumed that I would get married. Because that's what you do, right? You find someone and if it works, you marry them. And sure, you're already committed and you're already living together and having sex and parenting two cats, but you still have to get married. Right? Because... otherwise... something. Especially if you're going to have kids because... well, I guess children's rights in Canada are based on parental status and don't have jack shit to do with the parents' marital status, which makes sense, but if you have kids and you're not married then... um... !!! The bogeyman! Or something!

I thought I was done questioning my Major Assumptions About Life, but here we are. Hey, at least I get to joke that if I never get married, I haven't been having pre-marital sex at all. Jesus likes that better, right?

1. The slowly mounting social pressure:
   
   • "Wow, you're moving in with your boyfriend? So, are you getting married?"
     
   • When we're playing with Ada in public: "Oh, I can just see this in 10 months!"
   Still working on a response.
   
   
2. War/Photography: An Interview with Simon Norfolk:

   "Part of this interest of mine in the sublime means that a lot of the artistic ideas that I'm drawing on partly come out of the photography of ruins. When I was in Afghanistan photographing these places—photographing these ruins—I started looking at some of the very earliest photojournalists, and they were ruin photographers: Matthew Brady's pictures of battlefields at Gettysburg, or Roger Fenton's pictures from the Crimea. And there are no dead bodies. Well, there are dead bodies, but that's very controversial—the corpses were arranged, etc.
   
   But a lot of those photographers were, in turn, drawing upon ideas from 17th century and 18th century French landscape painting—European landscape painting. Claude Lorraine. Nicolas Poussin. Ruins have a very particular meaning in those pictures. They're about the folly of human existence; they're about the foolishness of empire. Those ruins of Claude Lorraine: it's a collapsed Roman temple, and what he's saying is that the greatest empires that were ever built—the empire of Rome, the Catholic church—these things have fallen down to earth. They all fall into ivy eventually.
   
   So all the empires they could see being built in their own lifetimes—the British empire, the French empire, the Dutch empire—they were saying: look, all of this is crap. None of this is really permanent: all of these things rise and fall. All empires rise and fall and, in the long run, all of this is bullshit."

3. I have no idea how long ago the German Kaldeweis split from the Dutch Kaldeways, but maybe I can still get a deal on some rocking bathroom fixtures. I stumbled across a Kaldewei ad in the latest issue of Real Simple and was a bit stunned for a second. My name isn't common at all, and I've certainly never seen another version of it aside from the Kaldeweij version that some people in my family have.