Settling in?

When we arrived at our new apartment complex in Maryland, we were excited -- to say the least. We'd just been through a horrid move and were happy to have reached our final destination.

The rental agent took us on a tour of our new apartment before we moved, so we could note any damages together before signing the lease. My wife hadn't yet seen the new place. She had trusted me back in February to come down myself and find a place. I was really hoping she would like the new place.

The agent unlocked our front door and let us in. Holy crap. The place was HUGE. I knew it was going to be significantly larger than the broom closet we lived in up in Boston, but man, it was amazing. When I came down to find the place in February, I hadn't gotten to see a floorplan like the one we were getting. We had gotten a one bedroom apartment with a den, balcony, walk-in closet, and a breakfast nook.

I know the agent was chatting with us about something when he showed us around the place, but I couldn't hear him. All I could think of was how huge the place was. I was holding in a maniacal triumphant laugh. I looked at Amy with crazy eyes. She seemed to like the place as well.

Off we went back to the rental office where we signed away our lives to the complex for one year. Then we went back out to the rental van and drove it up around to our new place. That's when we realized that there was not a parking lot close to our building. Our building was in the center of a few others, with only a long sidewalk path leading down (with about 12 stairs) to it from the parking lot. Once you went down all those stairs, then you had to go up another flight to get to our second floor apartment. This does not making moving in easy, I didn't realize we were going to have to carry all our belongings that far to move them in.

Oh well, I sighed, it could be a lot worse. So, our friends showed up and helped us move in. It was three skinny chicks and one tall guy with back problems, but we did it.

That evening, I sat and marveled at the appliances in our apartment. Not only was our new place mansion-like to me, but we also had a washer and dryer in there, AND a dishwasher. I could wash clothes whenever I wanted to. Whenever I wanted to. No more weekly hunts for quarters. No more carrying 50lbs of laundry down the street to a laundromat.

And hey -- if we had a big dinner party -- who cares? I have a dishwasher. If I spill something on myself at said dinner party, later that night I could wash that stain out immediately in our washer, and at the same time wash the offending dish.

I sat on the kitchen floor with a funny little smile on my face, nodding approvingly at my new best friends/appliances. Amy caught me before I started giving my new friends the hugs they so deserved. I made a note to sneak back into the kitchen later to do that.

As we unpacked things that evening and the next day, we made several significant observations:

#1- We had no chairs. Because of the van size SNAFU, we had to leave our chairs behind. It was no big loss then because we hadn't paid much for them at a garage sale. And honestly, they were ugly and didn't match. Yet now our new place was chair-free.

#2- We had only one lamp. Our new place had many rooms, yet only three light fixtures.

#3- We had no vacuum. Sure, we had the little Dirt Devil thing, but I didn't really feel like crawling around the entire place on my hands and knees vacuuming with that tiny thing.

So we went shopping. First, it was off to Target to buy lamps.

I was stumped -- how the frick does one buy lamps? This was going to be a major decision because for once we thought it would be nice to have some of our furniture match. We had a futon we used for a couch that had a black frame.

I sat there in the Target lamp aisle stumped. It was like remedial reading. "L-L-Lamps? M-M-Matching?" The color chart in my head went crazy.

And you also have to buy the lamp and the lamp-shade separately. WHAT THE HELL?!? So now not only the lamp had to match the room, but now the shade had to match the lamp AND the room? My eyes started to cross.

Amy handed me a bag as I hyper-ventilated in the aisle. She made an executive decision to lay off the major lamp decision -- and instead buy a floor lamp like the one we already had. It was one piece, easy to match the other things in our rooms.

We decided to save the lamp decision for the Grandmaster Decorator: My mom.

She would be arriving the next day to help us unpack and make the apartment look good. This made me happy, as it appeared to me that I was now entering the stage of life where one does not get their furniture out of the garbage. Things must look nice and match. That was the new goal that I had to now adjust to. One of my new goals was to keep myself from visualizing in my apartment the garbage furniture I'd see along the side of the road. It was a re-programming.

Back to Target shopping: After Amy had to help the quivering mass of lamp-confused me out of the lighting aisle, she made another executive decision to not have us look at chairs that day. It would have pushed me over the edge. And as for a new vacuum, we again knew that Mom would make the best decision.

To be continued....

Still to come, Heather's first trip to Ikea, and how to scare a roach. Stay tuned!