“Did you guys knock?”

“Huh?”

“Did you knock?” I asked, and then I saw what had sounded like the knock; it was them wrestling with the mailbox, which is difficult to open.

“Oh! You were getting your mail! It sounded like knocking? Hahaha!”

They both stared at me, and do you blame them? Getting mail should not sound like knocking, and I probably looked hungry and desperate for human interaction, using any excuse to chat with them.

“Ok, I’m going in now that I’ve proven myself to be your crazy downstairs neighbor! Bye!”

I am so awkward.

I know! I thought we got all our stuff out of there, too! We certainly paid the movers enough. But there’s still stuff in there.

All the furniture is gone and has been moved to where it’s going to be, but there’s a bunch of STUFF, just STUFF, the stuff that piles into the corners and gets in the way and annoys you because you don’t really know what to do with it, where to store it, or even why you need it, but you can’t throw it away because OMG what if you need it next week except, you totally won’t. But you might. Also, it was expensive.

If you have a place you’re living for a while you have the luxury of ignoring it and storing it, but I have to move it outta there, and the way I’m dealing is sticking my head under my pillow and going “La la la, is it August yet? No? Ok. La la la.”

For some reason, this method is completely unsuccessful in moving the piles of stuff out of the old apartment, nor is it taking care of the other task at hand after getting all the stuff out: “broom sweeping”. That’s term used in real estate to mean “you didn’t bleach it, but all your stuff is out, and there isn’t dirt everywhere.” or rather “Empty, and reasonably clean.”

I just don’t want to. It’s hot. I’m tried. This is overwhelming. Podcasting was rough this week. I need a nap.

Just a little further, Amber. Just a little more.

One of the things we did early was put our bookshelves in the empty apartment and fill them.  By “we” I mean Eric.  The wall they are on is drywall over brick, and I said to Rob, “There is no way we are tackling this ourselves.

If you ask nicely he’ll wear his tool belt while working (you know, for the ladies who are into that sort of thing) and he gives a discount if he can bring his dog.

Thanks, Eric!

It doesn’t feel like home yet, and I wonder if it ever will. It’s very small here, and it’s clear that we will have to move eventually. Not just because of the space issue, either; the landlord actually told our real estate agent, “Three dogs is no problem, but NO KIDS!” It’s quite nice for now, though.

Stu! came over Saturday with champagne and cupcakes to celebrate the new place, and we spent the afternoon with me shirking unpacking responsibilities to show off the new neighborhood and slowly but surely convince her to become my cup-of-sugar neighbor.

Thank you to Effed In Park Slope for the Twitter welcome! This 4-part-series of videos they did of the local Target explains, to a level I don’t have the ability to blog about, why I feel like I’m descending into the seventh ring of Hell when I go.

*Apparently the really rich people leave their homes and go away for a few weeks and people come and pack them up and move them. Then they come back from vacation to a newly set up home somewhere else!

We painted every white wall first with “risky” colors that I hoped I would come to love, and having the ugly trim paired with my freshly painted walls that I wasn’t quite sure about threw me off into believing the entire place was a disaster. I was so upset thinking that I was going to live in the UGLIEST! APARTMENT! EVER! and that I spent money for paint and worked hard painting for that privilege. (It would be one thing if the apartment was ugly through no fault of my own, but to actually make it ugly? Unbearable.) Now, though, with a few coats of America’s favorite paint color, Navajo White, the ugly trim is gone, replaced by crispy colored trim that gives the entire apartment a fresh, modern feeling. It’s downright beautiful if I do say so myself!

We’re half-way there getting the trim done; the ugly color is so deep it requires two coats of Navajo White, and is so extensive – every room, every doorway – that I’m going to be super busy painting it all before moving day Thursday. I’m listening to Pygmy by Chuck Palahniuk while I’m doing it, which helps pass the time better than music.

I’ll be back in a few days, posting from Park Slope!

_____

*Oh, it was bad. The worst was that my friends tried to talk me out of it, even as they were painting it, and I was all, “No, no! It’s gonna be great!” and I loved it for about three seconds, and then I was devastated and had to paint over it.

“It’s fine!” he said, but then later he admitted, “I would have just left it. But I know you. You need it nice. So, we paint.”

How great is my guy? It hadn’t occurred to him to bother talking me out of painting the entire apartment, he just sucked it up and did it.

You may take this moment to stand up and applaud my husband for his awesomeness, thoughtfulness, and wonderfulness.

Later, he was all hugs and consoling pats on the back when I had a meltdown and could not paint another single stroke. After that, I was sent home to shower and relax while he spent the day finishing up by himself. I really hate moving, but since I have to, I’m glad to go through this with Rob. He is a good dude.

We painted two colors, a light slate blue that’s unusual but growing on me, and a color that I thought would be a hip modern camel-butterscotch beige, but what actually turned out to be a mustardy, baby-poop, project housing hallway tan. Bummer! I’m hoping that will grow on me, too.

The whole process of picking colors was frustrating and overwhelming.  I’ve picked paint before and had both great success and horrible results. If I was doing it again, I would have borrowed the ENTIRE color deck selector from Home Depot rather than deal with traveling to Home Depot several times for a bunch of chips (at one point I had about 2 dozen different beige squares spread out on the floor of the new place and let Stu! pick what she liked; she told me to throw them all out and try again).

***

According to this article NYTimes, we are part of a growing trend of people that rent in NYC and buy in the suburbs. I wish we had thought of this before we spent months and months looking for something to buy here last year! We felt a little crazy taking this unusual real estate path, but it seemed like it made sense, and a year later, I’m excited about our decision. See? I do live and learn! Just not about picking paint colors.

Yeah, that’s right.  Feast your eyes on some grade-A, 1995-era clip art.

Dudes. It happened. We’re moving.

It was a frustrating process of the real estate agent rooting for us (and the dogs) to the old, barely-speaking-English landlord. His big concern about us (I kid you not, this is verbatim) was that we would have loud parties in the back yard until 5 in the morning. I was like, “Dude, we’re moving away from exactly that.”

Our official move-in is on the 15th of July, but we’re going to get the keys before so we can clean and paint (there’s a painted blue stripe around EVERY door way and EVERY window that I just… don’t understand!) The movers are here on the 16th.

The studio is also going to move on the 15th to it’s new home downtown, and we’re moving the stuff that won’t fit into the new, smaller apartment to the basement of my grandma’s on the 21st.

This is one of the apartments that was taken away by heart-breaking circumstances, and to tell the truth I’m still not 100% on it. We said we wanted it and thought we would get it, but then the landlord’s relative needed a place and he was going to give it to them. They backed out suddenly, and we were back in the running. We met to sign the lease on Sunday and he found out we weren’t taking the apartment on the first of the month, so he was like, “I dunno about those two!” My agent told me not to worry, he’d come around by Monday, but of course I worried anyway. He took a day to “think about us” and then said, “Ok”, but he still hasn’t signed the lease (he was “busy today”) and I watch enough People’s Court to know not to bother getting excited until he does. But I was told he said yes, and my agent has a good relationship with him, so I trust her. I am thinking-as-if, I am visualizing the signed lease, (I am full of shit and I know it…)

Also! My name is legally changed as of Monday morning! The judge called me in to his chambers and made sure I was an upstanding citizen, not trying to dodge bill collectors or commit fraud, and that I wasn’t a sex offender. I’m now fine-tuning my tour of Connecticut bureaucratic offices this week, you know, while I’m packing and moving the studio and trying to clean and paint a new apartment and deciding what should come and what should go into storage and shopping for new drapes and a new rug for the bedroom floor because, by the way, did I mention that the bedroom floor of this new apartment is LINOLEUM?

This is going to be fun.

Space? I can definitely sacrifice space. We own a sprawling five bedroom house with a mondo-sized basement an hour’s drive away, and only one Grandma lives in it. She’s is thrilled when we “invade her space” because she loves us so much, so coming and going is never an imposition. Storage is the easy part.

I can live without a dishwasher. It’s was really difficult, and now it’s easier. We’ve both learned to be responsible with keeping up with the dishes. Having to deal with the pile ups that result in mandatory two hour dish washing marathons, the broken cups and plates that slid off and shattered because there wasn’t enough room for them all crowding on top of the stove, and even a few maggot incidents made us more responsible by necessity. We have a system: Rob washes the bigger things that are too heavy for me to manage, and I wash the silverware he detests. We both do plates and cups. All this, and we’ve never had to resort to paper plates and plastic forks. Go us!

I can live without a washer and dryer, although it pains me to say it. Sending laundry out isn’t horribly expensive, and, if one is close by, going to a laundromat won’t be that bad.

We think we can live without a yard. This is kind of a tough one for me. I don’t care for me, I care for the dogs. They’re used to having a yard, and I’m afraid they’ll be sad. The necessary walks will be good for them, though.

I am dreading the hunt, though, but I’m inspired by Katie‘s “about” page. It says simply this:

brooklyn

two girls

one boy

one husband

600 square feet

If she can do it (and manage all the wonderful crafty things she does, too) I can, too. It’ll be worth it to live in a nicer hood. Thank you Katie, for the inspiration!

I went upstairs and knocked on my neighbors door, hoping they would stop doing whatever it was that was turning my bedroom into a swamp. There was an Eddie Murphy-esq “WHO IS IT?!” behind the door (we are in Bed Stuy, after all, and this is how you answer the door in MY neighborhood!), and when they finally opened they had no idea what I was talking about. They were also less than thrilled to be bothered at 10:30 in the evening by my, “Hey, you’re flooding my apartment, can you quit what you’re doing?” request, but whatever. I was less than thrilled to have their stanky bathwater splashing on my bookcase, so we’re even.

Thankfully it was only the walls and some laundry that got hit with the ick. Nothing got on my bed, which would have been so trauma inducing after the week I’ve had that I would have had to be committed. The super and landlord are taking care of it now. I got one glimpse of the gigantic hole they’d sawed in the ceiling and the black, gooey stuff that was coming out of it and decided to hide out downstairs for the rest of the day with the dogs.

Update: The neighbor’s tub has been plugged for months, and instead of alerting the landlord, they just let it be. The result was the pipe burst and leaked all over my bedroom. Awesome.

I miss owning my own house.