perspective

Tl;dr version: if you just want pictures, scroll down.

Today was THE day. The magic water box. (a Zojirushi hot water dispenser) came to rest in its new kitchen home and sang us its happy little “water is hot & ready” song. This makes our move-in officially complete.

Bringing over the tea maker and our everyday clothes was the culmination of the long and hectic week. It started with the movers hauling over all the Big Things & Many Boxes on Monday and that wasn’t enough, so we arranged to have MOAR THINGS arrive on Wednesday. 33 new things, in fact.

Now it’s Sunday night, the old house is empty of all but the non-essential flotsam & jetsam of daily life, all the moving boxes have been unboxed  (or stored, as appropriate) our new mattress has done its unfoldy-expandy-floofy thing, and food is in the fridge.

The move-out won’t be done until the old house gets sold & the remaining “staging” furniture comes over, but this space is now ready for all our Home Things to happen.

Things like making a morning cup of tea after snoozing all night at home in bed

At home.

This is our home now.

I feel like that idea should take longer to sink in, and I’m sure it will in some practical ways. But at the same time…it’s a done deal.

There’s a strange kind of magic in the moving of one’s life from one location to another. The process is messy and complicated and a lot like camping in bad weather — much more fun  to reminisce about than to live through.

Things get lost. Lost things return from limbo. Discoveries are made. Mysteries arise. Old issues re-surface, and new problems pop up at every turn. Surprises of the pleasant and unpleasant variety appear at predictably unpredictable intervals.

I’ve moved a lot in my life, enough times I would have o think hard to count them all. The first one happened when I was younger than 5. Every time, somewhere in the middle of all the upheaval, something simply changed. Home stopped being one place, and became another. 

This time, for me, it was hearing the tea maker beep.

Have more random phone photography.

penguns on the telly

teamaker on display

new book nest left side

new book nest right side

ROOM in the bedroom

And also a comfy bed

and a bonus pic from earlier in the day, just because it’s pretty:

And that’s all the all there is for now.

Tl;dr version: if you just want to look at pictures, scroll down to the end.

This post is about colors. I love vivid blues & greens. Cobalt blue is my favorite color ever. Much of my wardrobe comes from that part of the spectrum. My hair is often bright blue or green.

But.

When it comes to my surroundings, I go straight to the earth tones every time, and the lighter, the better. Leafier greens, red-mineral browns, and the kind of creamy pale shades of gold you see in autumn meadows.

New house is mostly painted in cooler colors like cloudy blue and sage green, but they’re earthy enough to live with for 5+ years, which is when the walls will be due for refreshing anyway.

But some of the color choices were Just Too Much:

1. a minty-fresh green in one basement room (henceforth to be known as the game room)
2.  a turquoise I’ll call bottom-of-a-California-swimming-pool blue” that was used in a bedroom, a stairwell and in the utility area of the basement.

Both colors are pretty. I have shirts in those colors. For walls, thought? No. Sorry, not for me.

Spouseman concurred with my judgment, emphatically so. And thus in the fullness of time, painters were hired, and lo, they have made with the painting.

I had to be at the new house at 7:30 AM two days running, which was a fun trick to manage while still living in the old one with the car in the shop all week. I got up on time both days, and the results were more than worthwhile.

The walls in our bedroom, the game room & elsewhere in the basement are now all warm, bright, and mellow…or they’re boring and bland as hell, depending on your perspective. What matters to me is that I’ll sleep better in a room with “light honey” walls than I would in one that made me feel like I was underwater.

And Spouseman says the games room looks calmer now. For sure it looks more like a room in a house and less like a dentist’s waiting area, and that’s all I ask from a finished basement.

Last note: in one of those amusing moments life sometimes offers, I realized today that without even trying, we’d matched the downstairs utility area paint toathe original vintage ’30’s door into the mechanicals room.

oh-so-blue before

After

before-blue 2

sunny warm after 2

The original eye-popping

interim painting

MInty-fresh before 2

mellow after 2

Here’s the door and peeks at the other painted basement parts:

before…

after. It’s brighter than it looks, my phone camera isn’t all that good.

And as a bonus, another pic of my evolving soon-to-be-office space: