Adios, Efficiency!

This picture was taken the morning that we left the efficiency for the airport, by the mister's father (thanks!).  For anyone who didn't get to enjoy the full tour, it was crammed full of stuff and things, leaving not-a-whole-lotta-space to walk or move around in.  

I barely fell asleep that night, teeter-tottering between "worriedness" and "excitedness".  So, in the interest of privacy {and shielding from my awful morning face}, our head regions are somewhat blurred out. Having been wrapped up in the GO-ing part of moving, I forgot to eat breakfast.  Thankfully, we stopped at a drive-through, nommed on some calories, and managed to prevent food-tude.  Phew, what a relief!  

The efficiency had only one "room": the bathroom. Other than that, it was an open area.  No more seeing the kitchen from my bed. Yay!

I still can't believe how many boxes we had in there, and how well everything is fitting into our new place.  Finally... no more cramped mini-storage!

Vanishing Boxes

Sounds like a bad magic trick, right?
A person/group of people/company is coming to take the boxes away early this afternoon.

FINALLY!

I'm supposed to move them closer to the entry way.  hopefully I wasn't supposed to break them all down by myself, but I'll find that out soon enough...

Outwitting the Music

I have quite a bit of sheet music and other books for cello and piano.  It hasn't really been organized or sorted through in quite a while (read: ever?), and figured it was about time.  The "giant-stack-of-formidable-music" was previously jumbled all together.  This was a huge pain to look through each time I wanted to find one specific piece of music.  These past few days, it has been my project to sort through all the music by instrument, and then attempt to sort it -somewhat- by skill level and music type.

"AHA!" I thought to myself.

...it dawned on me that stores make special things for organizing other things.  I checked out the office supplies section of Target and found two nice sized boxes with hanging files inside.  So, I bought the portfolio type boxes and they each fit nicely inside the larger, sturdier box.  (Boxes, boxes, boxes! I can't seem to escape boxes!)

There's some stuff that doesn't fit in the two smaller boxes, so it stays in the "extra space" or sits on top.  The oddly shaped extra strings, metronomes, rosin, polish, etc. fit perfectly in the lower left corner area.

So now, when I want music, I can lift it out vertically and have a much easier time searching for it.  It might sound lame, but I'm glad I finally made sense of it all.  We finally have enough space to leave the cello (and the mister's guitars) out in the den, and there's a piano/library room in our apartment's clubhouse which we have 24/7 access to.  I've only tried it out for a few minutes before, but it seems fairly decent. Now I just need to make myself take a break and go play for awhile!

Unfamiliar sounds

Two or three days ago, the weather was really rainy, pretty blustery, and quite cold.  VERY unpleasant to be outside in, so the mister and I chose to stay inside for the evening.  I didn't think the weather was horrible or anything, just really, really icky weather. (Definitely not picnic weather!) We heard a loud siren; it was pretty identical to what we know a tornado siren typically sounds like. Wondering about it together ("the weather's not that bad, is it?"), we decided to ask our neighbor what was going on. 

We had met our neighbor briefly when the movers were in the middle of hauling all our stuff inside, so we didn't have too much time to chat.  Anyway, I knocked on her door to ask her what the sound meant.  Alas, she told us that it was a siren from the local fire station.  That was a relief to hear, but also made us wonder what the tornado sirens sound like around here . . . 

As much as it was a little annoyance, it wasn't really that loud; just loud enough to make us double check.  I really can't complain about a fire station being nearby, since that's a good thing in my book!  I hopped on over to Google Maps to check it out, and it's exactly one mile away as the crow flies.  Thus ended the mystery of the loud siren and our evening resumed to pushing boxes around for fun.

Anyone need a box?

We've got plenty of boxes to spare!  These are all the empty boxes...there are boxes stuffed with packing paper, boxes inside of boxes, boxes next to boxes, boxes that have been flattened, boxes that I trip over, boxes behind boxes, and boxes, boxes everywhere! (It feels kind of like a Dr. Seuss book, but the socks are in a bag, unfortunately and not a box, so that's not quite as catchy.)

how many boxes?

Our five boxes of books are staying in boxes for now, since we don't have a bookshelf to put them on yet.  They're too heavy to stack, so they just get to hang out in the den's closet for a little while longer.  Once everything's more in order, there will be pictures of things besides boxes, but for now... this is it!  Exciting, huh?

The mister and I have really enjoyed having an actual area to call our dining room. I didn't measure it myself, but the floor plan online says it's 10'x9'.  It's nice to have space to move around in! Even though these boxes are stacked to the ceiling (like the efficiency), there's still plenty of space to walk around avoid the boxes. (Plus the boxes should be leaving relatively soon, since the moving company will take them away.) I think I'm going to be grateful for all this space for quite awhile!