The real finish line

Everybody do the Cabbage Patch with me now - our stuff is getting delivered next Thursday!

GIFSoup

Moving is NOT a walk in the park, no matter if you do it yourself, if you have movers, if you have to move straight into your house, if you have temp housing, if you have to stay with friends or family - it all sucks.

Even though living in the apartment is much better than being stuffed into a teeny hotel, it's still not ideal.  For one thing, I was only able to bring one suitcase of my things and the baby's.  That means for the past six weeks I have been rotating through two pairs of jeans, two dresses, three pairs of shorts, and a small handful of shirts.  I think five.  It's not the worst thing in the world, but it sure *feels* like I'm wearing the same outfit every single day.

And cooking!  Y'all know I have a cooking handicap and the kitchen is stocked with the bare minimum - I'm talking a small and a medium fry pan, a small and medium saucepan and a large pot for boiling water.  To someone who can cook with ease, this isn't a big deal, but for me it's anxiety-producing because now, not only do I have to look up recipes that don't have fancy spices or crazy obscure ingredients, I also have to find recipes that don't require fancy cookware.  Food processors are out.  Cheese graters - nope.  Cookie sheets - don't got it.  Crock pot - nuh uh.  Baking dish - nyet.  You get the idea.  If we don't eat out, we eat lots of grilled chicken and sauteed vegetables.  There goes my whole Holly Homemaker plan to have awesome home cooked meals for my foodie husband.  I was going to pack his lunch every day and I've done it exactly once because the anxiety over not having all the cooking utensils was too much.  My poor hubby.

I also thought that the second I got here that things would be different - namely, that I wouldn't have to be a single parent anymore.  But with Drew doing a lot of work on the house himself, he's going there after his day job and not getting home until like ten at night, so I'm still on my own.  It's been hard and those days when Sofia is testing me, it's even harder to know that Drew is less than ten minutes away.

However, it's all coming to a close!  We have less than two weeks in the apartment and then we'll be home!  Then, for real and for serious, we will be at the finish line and I can hardly wait.

But there are things to do before that happens.  Wanna see what they've been up to?

The kitchen doesn't *quite* look like this anymore.

Step one was to take off all the cabinet doors and rip out the soffit 

so they could raise the cabinets.

Raising the cabinets makes the kitchen look so much bigger!

And that stainless farmhouse sink is everything to me.  

That sink is the business!

However, since we raised the cabinets, that meant removing the backsplash and getting a new one, so we went to Home Depot to check out what they had.

Even though Drew and I have similar taste, we still don't perfectly agree on everything and he was showing me some crazy-ass tile options that I quickly vetoed.  I wish I had pictures of what he was looking at, but just imagine iridescent mixed with rocks dyed purple mixed with steel in crazy shapes.  He showed me and I was like, Glass tile, nothing else and get away from me with that disco shit.

So glass tile it became!

The above picture represents our choices.  I had wanted soapstone countertops but Drew had heard good things about Silestone so we decided to go that route.  The big countertop is the Lyra, the only marbly-looking one that I liked.  The small tile is the Gray Expo, the one we ended up choosing.  In the end, I got nervous that the Lyra would look too busy and the last thing I wanted was a busy kitchen.

But I was seriously conflicted over the tiles!  More than anything, I didn't want any element of the kitchen to smack me in the face.  I didn't want a backsplash screaming at me (*coughIridescentcough*) and I didn't want countertops that were all marbly and veiny, looking like outerspace.

To you, this may be gorgeous and that's A-OK.  

It just looks like a busy galaxy and that's just not my thing.

And PS, if you have these countertops and you ever have me over, 

I promise I won't say anything about them.  

I won't even think anything in my head about them.  Swear.

But back to the tile.  We were in the kitchen showroom for-ev-er and let me tell you, that's a mighty long time when you have a toddler who just wants to run.  Trying to talk out the pros and cons and take pictures and look at options while trying to wrangle a pissed-off toddler was the worst.  The next morning I mentioned to Drew that I might be ok talking about having another kid in a few months and he quickly was like, "After last night, I wanted to get f*cking snipped."  Welcome to my world, babe.  Welcome to my world.  But we talked out the options, we took pictures and we wrangled the toddler.

For the time being, we're going to leave the cabinets stained but we 

might want to paint them white later.  So whichever backsplash we chose 

would need to go with stained or white cabinets.

As much as I loved the simple clear glass tile, Drew thought it might look 

too washed out with white cabinets and stainless appliances.  

I thought it looked clean and calm, which is what I need in a kitchen.

We looked at all options and tried to see our kitchen in them.

We even got a white cabinet door to help us decide.

In the end, we went with the greeny-gray tiles and I'm really happy with them.  They came to template the countertops today and once that goes down, then they can do the backsplash.  I don't think that whole thing will be done by next week but the appliances are in and we'll have a fully functional kitchen by the time we move in.

Now to pick the paint!

We're leaning toward a lighter greeny-gray for the kitchen and a darker greeny-gray for the dining room and living room.  We might do stripes again on the dining room wall, because you know I love me some stripes!  The plan is to paint this weekend, because it's way easier to paint an empty house.  

I'm so happy things are coming together and I'm beyond happy to be reunited with my stuff!  I've been trying my hardest to be all yoga and zen and not be attached to material things, but I've failed miserably.  I want my nail polish, I want my shoes, I want my hair stuff, I want our three different kinds of spatulas!  I want to be more of a minimalist, but not this much and this drastic. One can survive on less, but it's not fun and when all you want in the world is to fix your chipping toenail polish but you don't have your stuff it's enough to make you go nuts!  I can't stand chipped polish.

But it's allll coming to an end and finally finally things are going to settle down.  I can hardly wait!  

Is it next Thursday yet?