Moving, Moving In, Getting Settled, Deliveries, and Going Broke
9/11/2009 was more for me than just remembering 9/11/2001, but it was the day that my condo recorded and I got keys. I picked up my keys at 5:30pm and was told that the seller would have been out of the condo by 5pm. Well, that wasn’t quite the case. I pulled up and low and behold there’s some guy going up and down the stairs to my condo taking out box after box. I figured he was running just a bit late so Brooke and I went and got copies of the keys made and pick up some food. Turns out he was there until 7:30 getting stuff out. Brooke went up and talked to him for a bit and found out a bit about the neighborhood and why he was moving. He and a roommate lived there initially, but the roommate moved out when the owner got married and his wife started to live there. Apparently they stayed about a month or so and decided it was too small and went looking for a new place.
The carpet was pretty dirty, luckily Brooke knew a carpet cleaning service that would come that evening. I don’t know how Brooke does it, but she always manages to get what she wants done accomplished; not only were the carpets cleaned at 8:30 pm and he left at 9:45, but it was cheaper than he initially quoted. So, with the carpets clean it was just a matter of getting things moved over….or so I thought. >_<
Saturday morning I went and picked up a UHAUL truck, which initially sounds like a great deal $40 for a bit 18′ truck, but after mileage, tax, and whatever they nickle and dime you for, it was over $100 for the rental for a few hours. Blah. My brother and I packed up the very few things at my parents house and waited for Russell to show up and we headed out to my storage unit to get the rest of my belongings. We were able to get everything into the truck and be on our way back to the condo within an hour, which wasn’t bad at all. In the mean time Brooke & my sister sat at the condo waiting for the delivery of my couch and my washer & dryer. We moved stuff into the garage first and then upstairs as needed. The beds went up easy, the TV was a bit difficult but it went inside. The hard part….the refrigerator. According to my brother I “suck at fucking measuring and didn’t account for the turn” and while I DID account for the turn, it was going to be tight as hell getting it in there. 
That’s when the delivery guys with the washer & dryer showed up. With the offer of $100 they gladly took the fridge upstairs. Took the doors off, lifted it up on these cool straps that go over their shoulders and it was up and inside in no time. The bad part was that the delivery company sent the wrong stacking piece so they couldn’t install my washer and dryer that day, so I had a dryer sitting out in the middle of the room.
The kitchen was FILTHY, hell the whole house was really dirty. I watched Brooke run a paper towel with windex over the counter and watch it come up nearly black. I know guys living together aren’t generally the cleanest of creatures, but I would have figured that the new wife of that one guy would have made him at least clean up a bit, but apparently I was VERY VERY wrong. Brooke’s mom, Lisa, came over and helped us scrub and clean things. She’s a super picky cleaner so it was great to have her assistance in cleaning things when we were first moving things in so we started out with a nice clean base and just not let things get as dirty as the previous owner had done. 
They just let it get SO bad, that it needed a really really deep clean before we really moved much else in. As we were cleaning, the cleaning crew that was SUPPOSED to show up at 1pm, then rescheduled for 4pm, then rescheduled for 7pm, finally showed up at about 7:45pm. I don’t know how, but it was like one of those clown cars. It looked like there was room for 3 or 4 people, but in a matter of moments there were upwards of 7 or
8 people in my condo all cleaning different areas of the house. After they left, we were able to take a breath and finally collapsed out of pure exhaustion. The couch had been delivered, the washer & dryer, everything that NEEDED to be moved inside that night was. We were so tired we slept on the mattress that evening, not caring that the frame hadn’t been put together.
The next day we went to buy some new sheets and I was able to put the bed together. We decided to go with a brown and white/cream look in the master bedroom and bathroom. 
The bathroom it’s just the towels and the shower curtain that go with this, but I don’t really have a picture of that, so I’ll have to add it at another time.
Eventually Brooke and I decided to break in the ice cream maker, and our first attempt didn’t turn out too well. It wasn’t creamy enough at all and just kinda….blah. The second attempt was pretty damn amazing, it was just a plain vanilla ice cream, but it was so smooth and creamy, that a little fruit and it tasted sooooo good.
This last weekend we decided to try out the bread maker we picked up and made some jalapeno cheese bread. It didn’t turn out too cheesy, but it sure does taste good. I had forgotten we had placed it in the bread maker before we went to bed and I was awoken at 1:30 by the smell of something very unfamiliar to me. I stumbled out into the kitchen to find a perfectly cooked loaf of bread. I was quite pleased with it, so much so I went back to sleep =P