Random & Progress

1st Item:

Back when I wrote the initial Apartment Tour post, I made a promise that I would get around to taking a picture of the front of the house. Well, today on my way out of the car, I finally remembered to snap a quick photo with my phone.

Here she is in all her glory. It's a typical brick multi-family house for the area. Really, the houses here all look just like houses in Pittsburgh to me. Of course, I caught in this photo the last bit of melting snow from our freak snow storm on Monday morning. The winter weather advisory warning read in a huge red banner: "1-2 in of snow over next 36 hours!"...it made me chuckle, but I digress.

We are on the top floor of the building. You see that cute balcony over the front door? That's ours, and we're very excited to do something with it this summer.

You see the round thing on top of the roof? That is the roof turbine vent that caused me so much pain and depression.

I'm all better now.

I have Pepin.

2nd Item:

Of all the things I missed from home while we were in France...

...Our nice, big Boos block was very high up on the list. I love you Boos block!

3rd Item:

We're slowly progressing. Soon enough we will have a fully functional kitchen(/apartment). For now, baby steps. We started this week by improving our storage capabilities greatly in our little kitchen with the purchase of some new shelving to go beside the refrigerator.

Before

After

Sorry for my failure to take an adequate before shot, I wasn't anticipating switching out the old shelves so quickly but when we found these highly rated baker's shelves on Amazon.com this past Sunday, we jumped on them. Despite the crappy before picture though, it is obvious that they were small and not quite cutting it. What isn't obvious except in person is the fact that they are hardly head together. Every time I put the KitchenAid back on top I would have to slam the sides in with my palms because it would start to shimmy apart every time you moved something to or from it. They are nice shelves, they just need a little TLC and aren't really practical in this spot.

One last thing:

Amazon Prime with free 2-day shipping is both amazing and terribly addictive. Progress at your own risk!