Moved In

The new house is pretty much good to go. The Wife and I have spent much of our time over the past several days getting it set up; is is liveable now and we have the ability to relax, watch TV, and — best of all — sleep on our own bed, with sheets.

That’s not to say things haven’t gone smoothly. It turns out our movers back in Knoxville were not the best. They loaded all of The Wife’s antique furniture supported by the legs. Consequently, a leg got broken off from the bottom of both her dresser and her armoire. Now, these legs are not like on modern furniture, for which we could buy a replacement and put the new one in. No, these are carved from the same piece of wood as the main body of the furniture. So we’ll need to figure out how to get those fixed.

The movers did other things that I’m not exactly fond of. One of the TV’s no longer seems to work properly; it takes input from the cable box but does not show any image on the screen or emit any audio. I don’t know whether it’s the TV or the cable. They loaded up boxes marked “Computer Equipment — Fragile” on the bottom of the stack with other boxes marked “books” stacked directly on top. “This end up” arrows were pointing every which way. I guess this picture summarizes what was done as well as anything else:

And tonight, I’ve got to haul out ten big garbage bags of trash and packing material, and about a hundred pounds of broken-down boxes to the curb because tomorrow is garbage day. It’s all stacked up on the side of the house now and for the time being I’m afraid the wind will blow it all away. I’ll have to take my chances, though, because last week the garbage truck came at 6:00 a.m., which is when I first wake up these days.

Tonight I cooked my first real meal here in the house (which needs a name). Tortellini, garlic bread, spinach salad, a nice Chianti. All from TJ’s. I’m unfamiliar at this point with gas ranges, so the temperature got a little higher than it should have. But I’ll get used to it again over time. It’s nice to cook, it’s nice to eat healthier, it’s nice to have a good kitchen.

By the way, my experience cooking in this kitchen has revealed a significant problem with the design. The kitchen is laid out like this:

From this view, the range is to the left, and the kitchen is to the right. In the middle is an island. When you’re cooking pasta, you need to dump the pasta water out into the collander, and carrying a big pot full of pasta in boiling water around the island is inconvenient. The Wife suggests that when we build our custom home, we’ll have a utility sink installed next to the range for that purpose.

The house still feels too large for us, but at least we’ve got our stuff setup more or less the way we want it to be. It’s turning out OK. I wish we could paint it, I wish it were smaller and more affordable (a house this size comes with a sizeable rent) and I wish the lawn sprinkler hadn’t failed the day we moved in, and that the builder had gotten it fixed right away so the lawn wasn’t dying. But hopefully all of these problems can get solved; it is turning into a home.