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Nesting…. nesting.. Nest..Ing.

Jul 4th, 2008
by adam.
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We haven’t been posting much, mostly because we’ve been busy nesting.

That’s the technical term for pregnant mothers who start taking on home improvement projects in their last trimester, in a vain attempt to be as busy as possible and to not think about their heart burn and the increasingly difficult time they have getting out of bed. (I have been sworn to say no more on the subject… but let us say there is a possibility of a videotape of the spectacle at some point. After all, a guy has to have some leverage!)

Anyway, not to be indelicate, but we’ve been nesting like the proverbial rabbits. In the past four weeks I have put together from kits a Crate and Barrel Hutch, a Crate and Barrel Buffet, an Ikea cabinet, a Joann Fabrics sewing table, an Ikea desk with four telescoping legs, 6 or 7 Ikea book shelf units, an Ikea sofa desk, and probably some other stuff that I’ve simply forgotten about. Some of these things I’ve even put together twice! (I got it wrong the first time!)

All in all, best directions go HANDS DOWN to Ikea, whose illustrations are always very clear. Sometimes they don’t make sense, or are in the wrong order, but once I’ve put something together, and have three left over parts, I usually can look at the drawing and figure out what I messed up. Worst go to Joann’s, whose illustrations missed several key points, and it wasn’t until I re-assembled the piece a second time did it become clear what goes where– and then I had to re-jigger it so that the little pneumatic gizmo had enough clearance on all sides to go up and down.

I’ve also had to lug and lug and lug this stuff out of the car, up the stairs, and in the case of the ikea book cases all the way up to the third floor. Not easy! And a lot of this stuff said “must be assembled by two people” and of course that means two people that can lift stuff, not one pregnant person who definitely should not be lifting heavy objects. Suffice to say that Stephanie helped as much as she could, and I did a little engineering to allow the very heavy awkward objects to be placed on top of one another (specifically the hutch on top of the buffet– the hutch weighed 120 lbs, the buffet 140 lbs, and I had to put them into place together. Aside from the windows being slightly mishung– it looks very good.

Today I’ve spent most of the day trying to clean out the second floor office (soon to be the nursery) and move that stuff up to the third floor. I’ve been up and down the stairs probably 20 times today. (The gym’s not open today, anyway.) I’ve moved a whole set of bookcases down to the floor level to either be free-cycled, or more likely put in the garage for a rainy day.

Now it’s hamburger time, followed by a potential fireworks show

Throwing out the towels

Feb 24th, 2007
by stephanie.
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Because I have the best boyfriend ever, we now have a new armoire in the unfinished master bath in which we can keep all of our towels. So my project this morning was to move all of our towels from our old armoire (in the bedroom) to the new one. (Have you guessed by now that this house doesn’t have a linen closet?) Trauma city.

Moving in together was the first of the towel trauma. We both had a lot of towels, me more than Adam, and we were both reluctant to throw any away. I think most of Adam’s did get tossed when we did the big towel combine, because few of his matched and mine were in better shape overall, but we still have a huge jumble of mismatched towels. And now – much to my dismay – they’re all on display through the glass front of the new armoire. (In fact, I’m planning to go to the fabric store to buy fabric to line the inside of the glass doors, just can’t stand it!)

I don’t know why I’m obsessed with keeping towels – I have towels way older than any of the clothes in my closet. I have a Sesame Street towel that I think my dad brought me back from Japan when I was a kid. I have a towel from my dorm room freshman year – black, like my mood that year. I have towels from my Oak Park apartment in 1993 – pastel stripes, because I was trying to be cheerful and pretend that I liked living there. I have a whole set of towels from my marriage to Bryon- white Frette towels we bought in Italy on our honeymoon. They’re really beautiful but completely impractical, because they’re the waffle-weave cloth and don’t absorb much of anything, but I refuse to part with them because they screamed domestic elegance to me at the time and I think deep down I still aspire to that kind of elegance, even though we’re living in a semi-rundown, cluttered clown house…. And then I have towels from my first NYC apartment, blue and lavender, but the lavender faded to pink somehow. But because they match the striped towels from 1993, they’re still around, a very nice matched set now. Well, threadbare and some are sorta holey, but matched. And they work, unlike the Frette towels, so they stay in the armoire. And then there are our current towels, bright laughing orange; we found them at the Ocean State Job Lot (Adam’s most favorite store) and they matched our office which is close to the bathroom, so now we have an orange-themed bathroom.

Nevermind the big stack of washcloths that I’ve accumulated, despite the fact that I don’t use washcloths and neither does Adam. Until recently I just assumed that when one bought a new set of towels one had to buy matching washcloths, even if one doesn’t really know what one might possibly use them for when a bar of soap works just fine. So there’s a bunch of those, matching every era of towels, which have been hanging out at the back of every linen closet and armoire forever.

Though it pains me greatly, I have managed to segment out about three bath-size towels, two or three hand towels and a couple of washcloths that I am now instructing Millie (our fantastic cleaning lady) can be used for rags. It will hurt to see the royal blue hand towel (from my Chicago loft, I think) used as a floor scrubber but I think I can manage it.

UPDATE: When I went to try and throw out two of the bath-size towels, Adam pulled them back, insisting that they’re “gym towels,” whatever that means, and that we keep them. Apparently this is even more traumatic for him than it is for me.