The question of how it feels to be home is kind of un-answerable just yet, but the process of reintegrating ourselves here has begun.
We broke out the cordless drill and put up a double curtain rod above the picture window. The sheers are up, drapes come tomorrow. We don’t have any shelves in closets yet, so our non-perishable foodstuffs are in grocery bags on the floor, pretty much where they landed after the last move from condo to our home.
Kitchen things have been mostly unpacked, and there’s a growing pile of crumpled brown paper from countless boxes and bins that finally have found their way from three different storage venues. I have to say that the symbolic gathering of our things actually does feel significant…almost in a soul retrieval kind of way.
Having access to items we used in the Ivory Tower that we purchased because we loved them is actually nice. I knew it would be. I suppose clothing will have to wait until we have closet bars and shelves, but that’ll be fun to see how our things fit us now.
What’s not so nice is the fact that the range that was delivered on Friday, two days later than was promised, has an issue that the electrician can’t resolve. Something about a faulty control board. There’ll be a service call involved, and because we still need to eat food, a few trips to the diner for sustenance-to-go has been in order.
Having someone else prepare our food is nice and all, but it does grow old (and expensive) quickly, so I got a single-burner induction cooktop and a tea kettle for the interim. Cooking meals definitely helps with the weaving of ourselves into the space, and this time, the space is actually ours.
There’s been a growing list of items to add to the stinky pile of shoddy and dangerous work perpetrated by the OC. Topping the list at the moment is the fact that they had an unlicensed actually stupid person install the mini split unit downstairs. There’s a Freon leak somewhere, and rather than chase unicorns trying to figure out exactly what the aforementioned person’s choices were in doing the job, we’ll just replace the whole thing.
Warranties generally require proper installation, too, so even if the GC’s HVAC guy manages to pinpoint and resolve the issue, I’ll have no recourse for future issues that might pop up.
This is a little like a camping adventure at the moment. We have a punch list for the GC of things we still want done, and he’ll have his own. There’ll be overlap of those finishing items, but none of it will happen before funding this coming week.
So there’s still lots of work ahead, but the truth of the matter is that we don’t need anyone’s permission to be here and do what we like, because it’s our home. Renter’s curtain rods and command hooks can be left behind for more permanent solutions, along with our own curated decorations and touches.
It’s kinda like playing house in slow motion…