these are not my walls

And we have pictures!

Have patience with me, I have a lot of pictures - probably mostly about things that nobody but me is interested in, but they're here for your viewing anyway!

So, on Sunday night, we packed up and moved everything (that wasn't already stored elsewhere) into our living room:



We finished at about 5 a.m. I had to get up for work at 7 a.m. It was a loooooong day.

When I got home, the floors in the hallway, closets and bedroom had been removed, and demolition on the kitchen was essentially done. And we lived in an E.T. house!



They'd managed to take down most of the kitchen wall we wanted (we wanted all of the wall between the kitchen and the living room/hallway - it's an L-shaped wall - taken down), but there was an exhaust pipe at one end of the wall, so it had to stay:





There was lots of demolition - I kinda wish I coulda been here for that. :)



The part where the wall came half-off looks great, though. And you can see where they put up a sheet of plastic to protect us, though we are apparently clumsy and ripped half of it down:



And all the yucky carpet was up from our bedroom floor! (Though not quite "out" of the bedroom..)



On the second day, they left us a door slit in the plastic, and it stayed up all night. :)



And they started laying floor!!



This is what our old floor looked like:



And it's gone! Gone!

Wednesday night, we had to move everything out of our living room and into the bedroom, where they'd finished the floor, so they could do the floor in the living room.



(Just, um, ignore the bras there...)

It didn't all fit, because our bedroom is smaller than our living room, AND they'd asked us to leave access to one wall in the bedroom so they could finish the baseboard, so some of it went into our downstairs storage. Some of it went into the car. And, uh, a lot of it ended up on our balcony:





I'm just waiting for our neighbours to complain...

On Saturday, Alex and I drove to Ikea in Vancouver to pick up our kitchen. This involved getting up at 6, getting the cargo van from UHaul at 7, catching the 9 a.m. ferry (the line-up for breakfast was almost from one end of the ferry to the other - it was CRAZY! It took us over an hour to get into the cafeteria!), getting to Ikea for about 11:30, spending 5 1/2 hours in Ikea (we had to wait one and a half hours for a kitchen employee to check the order and help us place it, then we had to wait another hour and a half for the warehouse people to get it all together. Though we spent the time wisely. By, uh, buying a couch and a wardrobe. :P), driving back and catching the 7 p.m. ferry (another huge line for the cafeteria, but we'd luckily eaten at the Tsawwassen terminal), driving home and unloading the van (4 elevator-loads to get everything out). Resulting in:

Our kitchen! In boxes! And a couple of bags!



Our wardrobe! In boxes!



Note that you can see our beautiful new floor in those pictures - wheee!

What you may have noticed missing from those pictures is our new couch. Let me offer you this instead:



In case you can't tell - and why would you be able to? - that is Alex's calculus (literally calculus! With, like, sin and cosin and shit!) to determine how to get the couch into our apartment. Because, as we determined at 2 a.m. this morning, it wasn't going to come quietly up the elevator, into our hallway, and into our doorway.

Yeah, it turns out that our hallway ceiling is a couple of crucial inches lower than our condo ceiling. Who knew? We did not.

So we left the couch in the lobby, stuck a note on it, and went to bed.

I mean, drove the damn cargo van back to UHaul (so we wouldn't have to get up and return it at 7, or get billed more), waited 20 freakin' minutes for a cab (super smart plan to finish just as the bars were closing, huh?), got home, and THEN went to bed.

Alex's new plan is to bring it in over the balcony. I'll keep you posted.