New House

Seems like buying your first home is a big enough activity to warrant a blog posting. It’s been forever since I posted, but things have been quite busy, and the culmination of that busy-ness is that we are now in our new house. At least, we are in the house physically, if not fully in. I remember how long it takes to get everything unpacked, but when you are counting on having access to every square foot of the house to make it usable, then every un-packed box, and every Thing that is out of place, becomes a road block to really being able to live in the house.

Last week was huge for us. We closed and changed the locks on Monday, the portable storage units were delivered on Tuesday, movers were there on Wednesday to help Amon get everything into the house (two hours and they were done!), Thursday we moved things around and Amon continued cleaning. I took off work on Friday to get some substantial work done before Amon had to go back to being a teacher today.

So after close to a week of moving, where do we stand? The kitchen is probably 90% set up. We really just need to install the over-the-stove microwave and do some final cleaning. The living room still has quite a few boxes as we are waiting to purchase some new shelving. The master bedroom is about 90% done, with our new bed put together, the closets almost done, and the big furniture in place. The second bedroom is being used for storage right now and looks the part. The upstairs bathroom is in need of some tile work before we use the shower, so until then we’re showering in the second bathroom located in the basement.

So that’s a brief update. The important rooms, kitchen, bedroom, and living room, are serviceable so we are able to live day to day, but the sheer amount of boxes and little projects are enough to keep us a bit on edge.

I cooked dinner for the first time in the new kitchen last night and it was mostly a positive experience. The obvious lack of kitchen space made things a bit challenging, but the new fridge, gas stove/oven, and Amon’s peg boards all worked beautifully. So far I’m loving cooking with gas and I’m looking forward to doing something a bit more exciting than spaghetti. In the meantime though, the simplest things are nice to have around.

I cooked whole wheat spaghetti, made some cheesy garlic bread, and a very simple salad. The water boiled fast, too fast really, so I had to add a bit more water, lower the heat and went ahead and seasoned the water, and put a lid on it while I worked on some of the other items. I sautéed garlic to put on the bread loaf we picked up at Trader Joe’s. I cut the bread length-wise, put the sautéed garlic, some butter, and shredded mozzarella in the middle, wrapped it all in foil and threw it in the preheated oven. By this time the water was back to a boil so I added the pasta.

While the pasta cooked and the bread got crispy, I cut up one of the peppers Amon had brought back from when she went to stay with Becky, sautéed that in the pan I’d cooked the garlic in and set it aside. The pasta was done so I strained it, added the sauce, tossed it and plated it, adding the peppers only to mine. The last bit was throwing together a salad made from romaine, a drizzle of olive oil, some apple vinegar we picked up from Zingermans, pine nuts, dried cranberries, salt, and pepper.

There was a bit of a learning curve as I had to figure out how hot to set the dials to get the pan at the right temperature (the garlic was dangerously close to being too dark and bitter, but the peppers were beautiful), and I had to micro-manage the amount of space I used for everything. I think the biggest take away was that my mise en place, prep work, is going to be very critical in the new kitchen as there isn’t really room to have many things happening at once. I think that if I prep everything ahead of time, so that I don’t need to have cutting boards out at the same time as strainers, at the same time as mixing bowls, etc. then I should be able to make this work. The focus of this blog may shift from living in the city to, “Big Idea - Little Space”. We’ll see how things go.