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I'm sitting here, surrounded by a trio of rather militant cats. Following a week of relative feline bliss, Sheleg has started to reassert her position of queen of the household, and the growling and hissing (and occasional fighting) is rather painful.
On Sunday, after spending a weekend with friends, M and I came home and almost immediately began to tear the place apart in an attempt to make it something other than a typical bachelor's apartment.
We started with the kitchen, which is woefully short of storage space (and severely lacking in the accoutrements necessary for a foodie like me), moving cabinets and appliances. On Tuesday we popped by Ikea and picked up a butcher block cart, so now we have somewhere to store our pots and pans and our wine "collection". The cart was a display model, normally sold for €39, but Ikea had painted a blue stripe on it, presumably to show their colour stains, so it was knocked down to €19. I'm not in love with the blue stripe, but it gave me an idea of how to hack it so that it fits with my design sensibility (i.e. looks like nothing that may have come from Ikea). I've since cooked a couple of meals, and though it's still tight in there and I still need some more tools and storage, it's shaping up nicely. Over the last two days I've made magnetized spice containers, and today I started filling them up. And no, I don't know why there are 17 packages of black pepper in this house.
The living room was the next project. It's a fairly large room, with a sofa and arm chair (angled) in one corner, a massive (Ikea) dining table in the middle, and another recliner in the other corner. The whole set up was brutal. The dining table was essentially placed where you would a coffee table. After much argument with M (not even getting into my distaste of the actual table ;)), we set the table perpendicular to one of the walls, and used the little nook behind it to set up an office, so now the table serves more as a desk than a table. We bought a small bookcase and had some existing storage, but there's still a lot of sorting and storing to do.
The bathroom and bedroom have remained untouched for now. There's not much to do there anyway - perhaps just change the colour scheme.
I should mention that we live in a "Dachwohnung" - an attic type apartment, so most of our walls slope inwards from about a meter above the floor, which isn't really a big help.
I have a lot of thoughts and ideas on how to decorate, but for the time being we're waiting to hear about a new job for M, which will mean moving to the north end of the city, so I'm not investing too much effort in making this place pretty, so much as livable.
On the employment front, I've sent out a couple of applications, but mostly I've been getting a lot of translation work, with a new potential client popping up that I'm fairly excited about. I sent off a translation sample to them today, and hopefully they'll like it.
There isn't much work to do today, so other than puttering around the apartment and spending time online, I'm fairly relaxed. I might grab Harry Potter in a bit to try to get through more of it. We've been so busy that I've only gotten through about 120 pages since we picked it up on Saturday.
Tonight we're riding our bikes to a biergarten about 3-4kms away, in Taufkirchen. I love the biergarten! Bring your own food, buy half a liter of radler (beer with lemon juice) and tuck in. The last two times we went we brought some games with us, which was a fun way to pass the time as well.
Posted by raptorgirl at July 26, 2007 03:22 PM