It is high time to write that blog post I've been avoiding for the past couple weeks, wouldn't cha say :p
Before I start, I just want to say, please excuse the kinda crappy photos, all but the first one were taken with my phone.
Ok, so where do I start...
Well, it's been almost a month in the new place. Everyone keeps asking how we like it, and we kinda forcibly say "it's nice" or "we do" but honestly for me, it has a problem that can't seem to be fixed: there are some smells, one in particular which comes from under the bathroom sink. The smell is so strong and bad, it fills up the bathroom and seeps into the surrounding rooms a bit. Then there is a smell every once in awhile in the bedroom. First off you should know, that as of right now, we still do not have a bed, so we aren't using the bedroom except to house the "bedroom stuff" and clothing, so we're not in there every night, but its a small apartment so anytime either of us are getting ready we are in and out of there. so sometimes there isn't a smell (I equate that to the windows being open ALL of the time) and sometimes there is a smell, and it switch's to being a musty cat litter/pee smell, to a smoker smell (which drives me insane). Honestly I think the smoker smell does come through the windows or something because from what i can tell, our neighbors to the bedroom side of the apartment seem to smoke, also they seem to be on the deck 75-85% of the time, so that could be the smoker smell problem.
Then the rest of the apartment (dining room, living room, kitchen,) has another smell, which I have to admit sometimes it is a kitty litter/pee smell it seems, but at the same time doesn't seem to be that at all, and I can't identify it. Don't get me wrong, the smells aren't strong, but they do seep through every room, so unless you are spraying Febeeze on a regular basis (2-4 times a day) the place has a smell, and even then the Febreze only covers the smell, doesn't get rid of it.
Now that was problem number one, problem number two, which isn't so huge, but still bothersome, is the ant problem. The first day here, I unpacked all my bath stuff and put it on my bath stand next to the tub (it's like 4 tier metal free standing bathroom stand) and the very next day, when I woke up and went to the bathroom I noticed on the ground, along the tub, a huge amount of ants running back and forth, going up the wall, and up my bath stand, and they seemed to have covered my grapefruit body scrub... it wasn't even open, I think a little had gotten out during the move and gotten on the bottle, and they were all over that. I almost freaked!
After cleaning up that mess, it's happened a couple more times in the kitchen, once when we forgot to start up the dishwasher, and it was slightly open, and a few hours later, there was a huge amount of ants up and down the cupboards going to what was inside, up to the ceiling, and another time just last night when the garbage lid was slightly askew, and we came home to find another impressive amount of ants coming from the ceiling to claim what was in it.
We never had this problem at our old place, and I understand if you leave stuff out, bugs will eventually get to it. But we haven't been leaving stuff out, this is just ridiculous, and the amount of ants, honestly in every circumstance, I've never seen so many except on a flourishing ant hill.
Now the third problem, is something that just can't be fixed, you see we got an apartment this time facing the road, and now we live on a very prominent road at that, so its busy, also we are less than a mile from the end of John wayne airport. I love to have the windows open, fresh air all the time, even if its somewhat cold, I love that, and especially with the smell problems we are having, I've wanted to do that, but the only time I can open the windows in the living room (where i am most the time and through the night since I'm sleeping on the couch) is at night, because it is just so damn loud, and I understand that compared to people who live in the middle of a big city, this is dead silence, but I'm from the country, and even our last place in riverside, it was fairly quiet....with the planes going near overhead, and the busy street right outside, its not so quiet :\
Now when it comes to the actual apartment, I would say yes, its much cozier then our last place, it's supposedly bigger, but here is the kicker, the kitchen is smaller, the bathroom is smaller, the dining room is smaller, and there is NO nice closet space in the hallway like our last place, so apparently there is just a ton of extra space in the living room and bedroom, which is exactly what we didn't need...so now we need to rent a storage space for just a couple box's and bins, but for now they are cluttering our deck, and thankfully I figured a way we can fit our dining room set in the dinning room, but it is pretty cramped, and we have most of the kitchen situated, but its much more cramped and chaotic then it used to be.
In all honesty, the coziness of the place doesn't really overthrow the problems, and yea we are dealing with it, but when it comes to actually liking it so far, I'm on the fence.
Now the whole point of moving was to be closer to my husbands work, and we achieved that, so that right there is the reason we are here, but do I want to stay once my husbands contract is up? I don't think so :p
So I've been focusing a lot on decorating, finally getting to make this place into a home as best as I can, hopefully we will be working on getting a bed this month, as we improve our credit and get on a monthly plan. I do have some exciting news! Last week we wanted to check out the local goodwill, figured since its in Orange County maybe it would be a good one, and indeed it is :) actually our intent was to look for some dining room chairs, we have had a huge dining room table that we got from goodwill last December when we first moved into our first apartment, but finding and getting chairs hasn't been so easy, and with all the things we went through it was kinda on the back burner. I was super tired of not having any chairs to entertain at this point.
well recently I thought, instead of buying new chairs, since I wanted wood chairs, nothing special, hopefully something not too modern, we would start looking at goodwill's, grab leftover chairs here and there, whether they matched or not. So since we had finally moved, we figured it was the right time, to check out the one nearest to us, and we found...
4 rustic wooden dining room chairs for $50! It did come with a dining room table, kinda like ours, except it actually had the leaf, and our doesn't, but we didn't want/need the table, and we figured for $50 is great price for 2 chairs, let alone 4; so we bought it all, and re-donated the table.
With the mini cooper it took a couple trips to get the chairs home but we did it!!!! and they look great! eventually they do need to be sanded and re-stained. But for now they work great!
another great thing is, I've been searching for antique or antique looking picture frames of all shapes and sizes, in wood and the colors gold and bronze. While we were at Goodwill, I also found 5 picture frames, and a little mirror that was perfect for what i wanted, also i found a little metal silver picture frame with roses all around it, and i got that too and painted it a metallic brown, and I'm excited to get a picture printed for it :) but here is the kicker, back behind a ton of weird framed art I found a gem, this big antique picture frame for only $7. It's absolutely gorgeous, exactly what I wanted, and I hadn't found anything that cool in a while; I was amazed nobody had picked it up given it was so cheap, because I felt that if that picture frame was on Etsy (where I had been looking for picture frames for awhile now) something of this caliber i feel would be going for $40-50 with like $20 shipping. So after that rewarding treasure hunt, it defiantly lifted my spirits! :)
One other cool thing is earlier in the month, around the time we moved, Michaels put all its fall flowers on 50% off. I knew eventually I wanted some floral arrangements around the house, but that was always last on my list, especially with the price of fake flowers, totally ridiculous, but the thing about this sale, is almost all the flowers, were my house colors, it was like a sign! Of course I wanted to go full out, but didn't feel I should because, well, its last priority, but my husband ushered me to take full advantage of the situation, so after a couple trips, and the move, I have 3 full flower arrangements, one in the bedroom, one in the living room, and one in the bathroom, and they all look wonderful! I also ended up getting a couple strings of fall leaf foliage that I decorated the living room with :) its safe to say, that the decorator inside me has been a bit trapped and festering for quite awhile, and it feels oh so good to set it free and finally feed and inspire the passion thats been so quelled.
The one pictured below iv worked on a bit since the picture was taken.
Since I've written a lot so far, I will now simply state without going into detail the rest of the exciting things that happened last month.
~I learned I actually like lamb, when done right.
~We made friends, Michael works with 2 of them, so we have been going over to there place every friday and sunday the past few weeks, and actually hung out a couple other times, like last week I hosted them at our places, and served our first cheese and cracker platter, (we went a bit overboard with the cheese) and last night we went to Dave and Busters till 1am with them and hung out.
~I finally got a wreath :) I've wanted one for our door for awhile now, and Michael bought me a beautiful halloween colored one as an impromptu present :)
~ Michael and I are finally starting another art project, the paintings for our friends weddings i think really took it out of us for awhile.
~ After a couple months of trying to find the thing that would tie the bedroom together, whether it be a picture or a bed spread, I finally found it, in the form of a bedding set. (Searched for the perfect bedding set for 3 months) and get this, the next day after I found it, it went on sale :) so I scooped that right up, and I'm so excited to use it, but I defiantly won't be pulling it out till we get an actual bed :p so its all boxed up for now.
I think thats it for now. There is a lot of personal stuff going on too, but i don't want to get into it.
now I'm going to go eat my gyro my husband brought home for me, and play Bioshock with him :)
Laters!
