My New Place

At the moment, life is nothing more than unpacking and cleaning our new home. I found a great unit up in northeast Rogers Park: a 2 bedroom, plus sunroom, plus formal dining room for only $850 a month. Those of you who know Chicago, know this is a great deal. What’s the catch? The place had been vacant for more than a year and needs some major sprucing up. On the flipside, all the original fixtures are still in place on this gorgeous vintage unit from the 1900s. With a little elbow grease, we could be calling this place home permanently. After 5 moves in 5 years, I can’t tell you how much I dream of just staying in one place for a while…

Here’s a preview of what the place looked like before we moved in. The pictures were taken by the realtor’s professional photographer and they paint the place in a nice light. You can’t see it, but I can assure you the place needs a lot of work. For example, I found a New York Times from 1985 in the dining room built in! However, the building did agree to fix a couple of things (replace the bathroom medicine cabinet, redo the walls around the shower, fix broken window panes and replace the fridge and stove). However, any cosmetic fixes are up to me & Z. So we’ve spent the last week and a half replacing the kitchen linoleum and plastic baseboards, re-tiling parts of the kitchen where the tiles had fallen off, scrubbing things till we bled, measuring and installing dowel rods in all the closets, building IKEA kitchen butcher blocks, replacing the PINK bathroom sink, PINK bathroom toilet and re-enameling the PINK bathroom tub, sweeping, mopping, dusting, windexing, wiping, and the list could go on and on!)

I’ll be sure to post some more detailed shots of the “before” stages before I unveil the “after” stages. Now you know why I’ve been so busy and why the art production this month has been slow!