Presents

It's always good to get presents. Seems like I'm getting an abundance of them this week. Since moving into our new house, we've been doing some upgrades around the house. It's not that our old stuff is bad, I just want to finally have matching furniture (like a grown-up), and stuff that isn't made out of particle board with a fake wood coating. The old things served their purpose, but now that we have a nice house, I want nice things to go in the house. And slowly but surely I'm acquiring my nice things.

It started with the fridge: we were content to take our fridge from the old house, but the people that purchased our old house wanted it left behind. So we decided to get a new fridge, and not just an equivalent one, but a better one - french doors, bottom freezer, automatic filtered water (those are the biggest upgrades). Oh and it's a little more energy efficient than our old one as well.

Next we ordered new office furniture. The desks from the old office were perfectly functional, but completely mismatched (Chuck's was an ash, and mine was particle board oak colored). We also have a very nice solid oak bookshelf, and a cheap black filing cabinet in the room. In our old house, the office was at the back of the house, and rarely seen or ventured into by guests. In the new house, however, it's right next to the front door, and practically the first room seen by guests. Hence the upgrade.

Since our new house is....well...new, we had to buy blinds too. For all the rooms. So the next thing we ordered was the blinds.

Our new house has a few more rooms than the old one, so that required us to get more bedroom furniture. Luckily we didn't have to pay for new furniture-my parents had a spare set for me in storage, and Chuck's parents gave him a beautifully restored set as well. Of course, the restored set doesn't have a mattress, so we're going to upgrade our bed from a queen size to a king - which means getting a brand new bedroom set (and sheets and comforters, etc) for it (ok, so maybe we didn't need to get new master bedroom furniture, however the current stuff is slightly beat up from the dog chewing the wood as a puppy, and the set is old, as in it was my grandparent's wedding set, then my parents, then handed to me. I'd like to be able to pick out my own furniture rather than get hand-me-downs at this point in my life). Our current mattress is going on the restored set.

Next on the list is a new sofa and loveseat. Our old ones are very broken down, not comfortable, and ugly-so much so that I have to keep slipcovers on them. I haven't yet figured out what to get, so that's going to stay on the list for a while.

This week has been especially good - the restored bedroom furniture and a few extra gifts (all our crystal wine glasses) were delivered by Chuck's parents Wednesday. Thursday the first of the blinds was delivered. Today the remainder of the blinds came in, and the new office furniture is due to arrive at any minute. Since these are the only things we've ordered so far (The fridge was put in 1.5 months ago, and the new bedroom and living room stuff hasn't been purchased yet), I'd say that's pretty good to have it all arrive at once.