Here I Am!

Look at that view! This is from on the way up Tantalus.

(Zorro the Gay Blade) We are now officially living in Honolulu. The move went mostly smoothly, if fast. We found out we got the apartment on Tuesday, packed up on Friday, got our stuff on the boat on Monday, flew to our new place on Wednesday and got our stuff off the boat on Thursday (the plan was to fly the same day we could pick up the stuff but I misread the schedule, oops). As you can see, we don't like to waste time once we have made a decision. I have to say, one nice thing about living on an island is that the whole moving process, while a bit more of a pain because you have to deal with boats, is conveniently stretched out so there is plenty of time to recover before the next step.

We have been spending our time buying things to go in our new place. Jason's parents very kindly gave us some furniture (the bed we were using at their house, the dresser, their couch) and a few kitchen things to get us started. Of course that meant we got to get everything else (the stuff we had before we lived with people for two years is still in a storage unit in Philadelphia). My days have been spent at WalMart, Target, Bed Bath and Beyond, and Ross. While we don't have everything yet, we are making good progress and only have a few kitchen gadgets and bookshelves left.

So, here are the pictures of our new place. Anna kindly offered to be the tour guide, in her tutu.

Here is the living room from the front door. As you can see, we have boxes of books on the floor until we get a bookshelf to put them on.

Next comes the kitchen. Sorry the picture is so dark. A couple of things that we bought that I love are the green colander (it's plastic) and a dish drainer that hangs into the sink. It has a decent amount of storage between what you see and there are cupboards under and abover the low counter that you see in the living room picture. If you turn around from this picture, you see this:

Behind the door on the right there are shelves where we keep food and behind the one on the left is just open so we put out ironing board and broom there. The top ones are too tall for me to reach.

Here is our lanai that is out the kitchen door. It runs the whole length of the apartment and we think it's about 25 feet long, to give you an idea of how big our place is (hint: not big). Out here there are washer and dryer (I think) hookups and a clothesline. As you can see, we don't have a washer yet but we would like to get one. Until then, the apartment across the way has coin laundry that we can use. It's been kind of fun to have the clothesline and I'm working on figuring out how long things take to dry here and how many clothes I can get up on it at once (not more than one load).

To the left of the front door is a little hallway to the bedrooms.

Here is our bedroom, the closet to left. It's really too hot here for a blanket so we just use our sheet. We're thinking that since it's shown off, we might want to get patterned sheets. The rigs on the floor are technically bath mats but they were so soft we just had to get them.

Next to our room is Anna's room. We put her art work up on the walls and her toys are in the boxes. We also brought her kitchen and little dresser with us, they're behind the camera. The day after this picture, Anna dumped out all the toys and we haven't gotten them put back together since. It miss it being so clean.

This is in our bathroom and the reason I'm including this in our tour is for these two things. First, check out that bathroom storage. There is also a little cabinet behind the mirror and under the sink so we have plenty of space for everything. I love then. Then, notice we only have a shower and a small one at that. Cleaning Anna was rough for a while there but we have since gotten a little kid shower head that is attached to a tube so it reaches down to where she is. After using the first time, Anna declared, "I love my new shower!" Definitely better than the previous torture session.

And that is our place. As I said, not big but it has tall ceilings and is big enough for us. I have yet to really feel cramped. Plus, we have great neighbors. I wish I could say you could come visit but all we really have to offer is an air mattress on the floor of the living room.