The Move In and The Kitchen

It was quite late when we finally left our old apartment, and I must have slept for most of the drive to Conflans. Once in the new place I was relieved to see all of our things again, even if most of them were in boxes in the guest bedroom.

The next day I became well acquainted with that stack of boxes. David had asked the movers to put almost everything in the guest bedroom to avoid a mess while we finished the kitchen and put everything in place. He was right, it made for easier navigation while we worked on our building projects, but the problem was that everything we needed for day to day life was somewhere in that room.

The boxes nearly filled the room, which meant that at least 15 boxes in one corner were not at all reachable. The first night we were lucky to find our toothbrushes, but on Sunday night we had to get ready for work the next day. And that's how my life became a living Tetris game.

It's funny - you don't realize how much stuff you need to get going on a normal day. I had to dig out socks, underwear, pants, shirts, and shoes for both of us. This required a bit of gymnastics, as I learned the general location of all of our clothes in relation to the other boxes. Then came deodorant, razors, and shampoo, which were thankfully all in the same box.

Then we decided to try out the newly-installed oven for dinner. I went back to the room and moved boxes around to find plates, silverware, napkins, and I've given up all hope for drinking glasses. I returned to the kitchen with my arms full to find a very tired and hungry David swearing at the oven manual.

The oven had come with literally 15 different instruction manuals, one for each of 15 different languages. The stack he had found were in languages like Russian and Greek. He was rife with frustration. I dug around the packing material and found 4 more manuals: German (closer!). Spanish (almost!). French! Yes! Good enough! I handed him the French manual and started rooting around for another one. Surely, amongst all those manuals, there must be one in English?
No luck. Dave flipped through the French manual and handed it back to me, exasperated.

I struggled through the "quick guide" in French, pushed a series of buttons, and finally figured out how to overcook a few mini pizzas we had brought from the old place. The oven is a microwave/oven combination, and I love that it saves space by putting two devices in one box. But the different combinations of oven and microwave can be confusing, and David refuses to use it because he can't even figure out how to heat up a cup of water.

Over the next days, we worked on the kitchen every night after work. David cut the hole in our countertop for the stove, and five minutes after he dropped it into place I was heating up the burners to make dinner. I figured out more buttons on the oven. We relished in having a full sized dishwasher. And with the help of an IKEA table with large drawers, we have more storage space in this kitchen than our old one. All of my worries about a small kitchen have evaporated, like water off a well-oiled wood countertop.

To commerate the event and make up for my lack of blogging in the past month, I made a little slideshow of the kitchen coming together. Which will probably interest about two people out there in cyberspace: my mom and David's.