Well, I finished packing to move down to Olympia on Thursday night, laptop, boxes, and all. We left at about 8am yesterday so that we could get down here in time for my scheduled walk-through with the property manager for Olympic Heights. We got here uneventfully and I checked in with the renting office. The walk through took probably 20 minutes or so, but it got done with several damages noted on the apartment check-in sheet. Good thing, too, since most of them are small things — there aren’t any large, gaping holes in the walls (as if I expected there to be any!).
After that, we went ahead and unloaded the car — you haven’t had fun until you’ve carried a 60- or 70- pound dining room table up a flight of stairs backwards and slowly so that you don’t fall and break your neck. I’ve decided that moving out of here, due to the large number of heavy furniture pieces, will require a moving company that can do heavy lifting for me. Anyway, we brought everything up, set up the dining room table, then went shopping for some things. We went to Target, picked up some supplies and some floor lamps (since the living room has no lighting in it, it has to be lit entirely by floor lamps — I also got one for my own room). We went to Joann Fabrics after that and got a 3-foot long wood dowel to use as a door jamb for the glass sliding door in the apartment, then went to lunch at Red Robin. After that, we stopped by Ace Hardware and got some nails to hang pictures and stuff with, then cruised through the Big Lots right next door to see if they had anything interesting. They did have a cheap futon for about $140, cushion and frame. It was tempting, but we didn’t go for it.
After a stint of grocery shopping, Mom dropped Amanda and I off at the apartment and said her goodbyes. Amanda and I spent the rest of the day Friday assembling stuff, including my nightstand, a small QBits storage stand to hold the cable internet stuff, and the frame for my desk (without putting the glass top or the small CPU/printer stands onto it). I put together all three floor lamps, which wasn’t quite as easy as it sounds. The procedure was relatively easy, but assembly was a little annoying, mainly because they pack it so that you have excess power cords that you use in order to store it that aren’t really needed once assembled and need to be stuffed into the frame of the lamp. That part alone took a bit, since the frames are a little narrow.
At about 6:00 (maybe 7), I went in to get the wireless router from the boxes, and got my laptop out at the same time. Lo and behold, out of everything I had packed, I had forgotten one very crucial thing: the laptop’s power supply. Thus, I’m stuck on batteries and waiting for the power supply to be shipped via UPS from home. Argh.
Anyway, since we had no bed, we slept on the floor in my room, getting up at about 8:30 so that we could be ready when the Bon-Macy’s delivery people came with the bed. That happened at about 9:30 — they showed up, asked me where I wanted the bed, then went down to get the bed itself.
At this point, I’m thinking it’ll take them about 15 minutes to fully assemble the frame, then put everything else together.
It took them about four minutes. I swear, I’ve never seen a bed assembled faster in my life, and by the time they got to me, if their delivery sheet was right when I signed it, they had already done two deliveries!
Amanda and I put the sheets we got at Target on the bed, then pulled my nightstand out of the closet and set that next to the bed. We then proceeded to bring the frame for the desk into my room and set up the glass top — it faces the door to the room, with the longer side of the desk extending outward from the wall in the space between the door to the room and the door to my closet. It looks good. We later added in the CPU and printer shelves on the inside part of the desk on the right side. I’m using those shelves as bookshelves, for lack of any other book storage other than my closet at this point.
We had an hour before Comcast showed up to do the cable internet hookup, so we went ahead and walked over to Target and got some more things that we needed, then stopped by OfficeMax and picked up a floor mat for my desk. We stopped by McDonald’s on the way back and got lunch, then came back and ate. Amanda went off to Joann Fabrics to look around for a while, so I spent my time doing some organization and putting up some posters in my room until the Comcast technician arrived.
The technician just dropped off the modem and gave me the stuff I needed to do a self-install — since my laptop’s battery power was nearly gone at this point (and I’m running Linux anyway, which is unsupported by Comcast), he couldn’t do a full install and said that he would try to get our charges reduced to a self-install configuration. That was nice of him.
That done, there was nothing else to do for most of the day other than organize some more and keep tweaking the room. That’s where it stands at the moment. I’m glad to be down here, but I almost feel like half an academic year has passed already!