Home Sweet Cottage

Greetings!

Cliff and I are happy as clams right now are we finally finished moving into our new place!  To get us here we needed an ABF pod to move us across country, a 17ft u-haul truck to get our stuff from the pod depot to the new place, a dodge mini van plus our car to get our new furniture home from Ikea, one week of literately doing nothing but emptying boxes and putting together furniture, and two trips with our car filled (and I mean filled) with collapsed cardboard boxes to the recycling plant.  To put it simply we are totally smitten with the cottage.  It is smaller than our old place but it has a lot of charm and it will keep Cliff and I from buying more stuff...as we can't fit it anywhere! We wanted to share a few highlights.

We have chicken friends!  They aren't actually ours as they belong to our landlords but we get to see them and interact with them.  There are a few more running around that are not seen in this photo.  They are so amazing.  Lots of goodies in our compost bowl now goes to these guys and they love us for it.  Awesome right?  Rudy is so mesmerized by them.  We will walk him up to the pen and he will stand super still as the brave chickens come up to check him out.  We are all big fans.

Getting storage options was really important for us in this apartment as we have so much stuff (i.e. books, school binders, VHS tapes, throw blankets, photos, kitchen stuff, and Fiestaware). Cliff has always wanted one of these desks and it is really going to help us keep all of our daily stuff contained in one place.  Also the shelves give me nice spots to place our nick-knacks and framed photos.  We have another nice square bookcase that helps to separate our living room area from our bedroom.  So useful!


Few things make me as giddy as getting to play with all of our Fiestaware.  Sad.  I know.  Don't judge me.  So I'm sure you can image my excitement when we found a big, bright red cabinet for all of the dishes to call home.  I seriously spent probably two hours standing in front of the doors figuring out different ways to place everything.  This isn't even all of it!  We are actually using many bowls and other dishes throughout the kitchen to hold things.  I stacked like items on top of one another so that I would have room to fit everything in there that we needed.  This cabinet gets bonus points as it is big enough to hold our cookbooks and our huge red pot.  Ahhh.  This cabinet makes my heart sing.


The new place comes with a wood stove.  Before we even came to look at the place Cliff was excited about the stove mentioned in the ad.  It is a bit finicky (Cliff is still working out the kinks) but it can really put out the heat.  It has been chilly here the past week so we have had a fire almost everyday.  It is really nice.  I feel so cozy watching TV with the fire and hot beverage in hand.  Also, Rudy is in love with the wood stove.  We always knew that he was not a cold weather dog.  At our old apartment his favorite thing to do was sit by the sliding door in the sun and bake.  I'm not sure if you guys know this or not but Oregon tends to be a bit rainy. We aren't going to see much sun soon so the wood stove was a must in order to keep the pup sane.  

I'm sure that many of you have heard me talk about my wishlist of things I am going to get once I strike it rich.  First thing on my list is an industrial shaved/crushed ice machine, followed by one of those endless pools, and then a sauna (this might be the only item that Cliff and I would agree on by the way).  Well our new place has a small bathrooms that is decked out in sauna wood paneling and it has a heat lamp!  When you combine these two factors (along with a little imagination) it makes you feel like you are kinda in a sauna.  The bathroom sadly has no storage and we have not figured out a solution yet but even with this going against it I still think the new bathroom rules!


Oh man...this brings us to the kitchen.  Cliff and I love to cook and bake and because of this we have a metric ton of kitchen stuff.  Seriously. Our last apartment was great because it had so much kitchen storage and counter space.  We knew that we were not going to be able to top it at a new place.  Welcome to the world smallest kitchen (probably not)!  We don't even have a full sized oven.  But you know what?  We don't care!  It took us three whole days to mentally prepare to organize the kitchen but it was well worth it.  We have enough room for everything.  The best part is now that we don't have a ton of counter space we are forced to do the dishes more often.  This means more manageable dish loads and a happier Kim and Cliff.


That is all for now.   Hope you enjoyed the virtual tour of our new place.  Come and visit!!!