When we last left the action, Peter was living in a sparsely furnished apartment.
Now, I was certainly making due with my card table and inflatable cot… but since I’m really enjoying this town and the work that I’m doing here, I’ve got a good feeling about sticking around a while. Certainly for the duration of my two-year lease, to say the least. So it was high time for me to get myself some actual furniture.
My family has changed around housing enough lately that there was a sizeable surplus of quality furnishings for me to choose from. In fact, even after I had enough stuff at my disposal to furnish the place twice over, I still had family members coming to me with offers of dressers and beds and desks and all manner of things that I imagine they were perplexed to have me turn down. Yes, I’m sure all of your items are wonderful and all, but seriously: I’m set!
So finally, a few weeks after my original move-in, I was able to rope my mom and Brad into helping me do The Big Move. We decided to rent a small truck on the off-chance that it would rain on the designated Sunday, but unfortunately I waited too long to settle on a date and time and so U-Haul (with their fantastically cheap 2-day rental with included mileage rate) were booked solid. Seriously – every location between Richmond and DC was out of 10’ trucks. Fortunately, my company was offering to reimburse me for moving expenses, and I figured I’d gained enough goodwill with them by not making them pay for a hotel while I was waiting for my apartment to be ready to splurge a bit.
And so we wound up getting a 12’ Penske truck from the local Home Depot. Unfortunately, they’d been provided with at 10’ van by the regional office… but luckily for us, the desk agent was able to hook us up with an unused 16’ truck. That thing was massive, but really fun to drive around the neighborhood collecting furniture from my grandmother and the storage unit.
 |
| Check out how color-coordinated we are. Even the truck decided to wear yellow! |
We got the truck fully loaded in the evening, and the next morning we headed up and navigated the big truck through town to my building. It took a few jumped curbs and some momentarily-threatened flowerbeds, but we eventually got the thing pulled up into the turnaround in front of the President Madison Apartments.
 |
| On the way, the truck made a friend! I only wish a Penske truck had shown up too so we could've had a drag race. |
Unloading went fairly smoothly, but when it came time to park the truck and actually do some furniture arranging… well, then came the tricky part. In case you ever come to visit, know this: parking in my neighborhood is tricky. If you let me know beforehand, I can move my car to an on-street parking space while all the businesspersons are at work on Friday during my lunch break and you can use my space, but that simply wasn’t going to work for a 16’ rental truck. We eventually wound up finding a large enough parallel parking space about a mile away in the business district near my work before heading back to arrange some of the larger furniture pieces.
Eventually we got tired of that and went on a brief tour of the neighborhood, including a lunch stop, before heading over to a street near my work to pick up the truck. My indentured crew dropped me off at my place to let me sort through all my boxes before making a beeline back to Richmond to beat traffic. I don’t blame them – you really never know what traffic leaving DC is going to be like, so it’s best to leave town as quickly as possible.
So I was left to sort through all my newly-arrived stuff. Fortunately, I was able to cram enough furniture into the studio to have enough space to store everything, but you’ll have to wait for the next post before you see just how the arrangement worked out. For now, you’ll have to make due with some stuff about MY NEW BED!
 |
| No, not this. Real bed or bust! |
The cot had been serving me well and all, but it was a bit to short and a bit too squeaky, so I was really looking forward to getting a legitimate mattress – something like the Twin XL I’d had in college. I’d toyed around with the thought of getting a bigger one, but with the arrival of my new sleeper sofa there simply wasn’t going to be enough room for anything bigger. Plus, I don’t roll around THAT much. In any case, a shopping trip was in order, but that’s not really the point of the story.
The truth is, with all the stuff I’d already crammed into the the apartment I wasn’t really going to have enough room for any bed without some creative rearrangement. I could get a Murphy Bed, but then you have to tuck in your sheets and hide your pillows every morning, and who does that?
So I once again returned to the college mindset and decided to buy myself a loft bed. It only took a bit of online shopping and a $95 shipping bill, but the pre-cut, pre-drilled pieces arrived and I was able to put the thing together in 3 hours. Well, 3 hours once I finally got a cordless drill to take care of the 100+ wood screws. And it’s a good thing it only took 3 hours, because I only started putting the thing together at 11pm on a Sunday night so that I’d have it ready in time for a friend from college to stay on my couch on Monday. If I hadn’t gotten it done... well, I would have had to sleep on the floor.
 |
| Easy assembly! Only 41 pieces plus fasteners! |
The point of the story? Come visit! I have space now!
Tune in next time for a tour of my luxurious, six-room studio apartment. Or, at least that’s how I choose to think of it.
