We are trying to move back home!
It's been nearly seven months??? since we moved away from our apartment so that we could, basically, replace all the surfaces in the the kitchen and bathroom. Finally, finally, we are almost able to move back in.
We enjoy the good fortune of having family nearby who liked us enough to let us move in during construction. There were a couple chunks of time when we were renting a place in Westwood, but we've mostly been in San Gabriel.
But now the work is done; the only thing we are missing is a refrigerator. But we can live without that... for about two days at a time, because I still need insulin, and that needs to be refrigerated. So we have begun to move back in this week.
Our other good fortune is that we own the apartment. The downside is that we have no landlord to give us a "landlord's special" renovation, and we in fact have to pay if we want anything fixed. Paying for stuff is the kind of thing that, as an indie dev, you kind of want to avoid. So the place has been basically untouched, and all the appliances and a maybe even a lot of the paint was original to the 1960s. There was a massive amount of water damage in the bathroom from our upstairs neighbors, whose five year old once ran the sink for so long that he managed to destroy our entire bathroom somehow. It was kind of like living in a cave!
The contractors did however successfully remove all that and replace all the walls and floors in the kitchen and bathroom. So now the sacs of hanging paint are gone, and some of the surfaces have tiles on them now instead of linoleum, which is very cool. Tiles are great. I have decided that I love tiles.
But now every single thing we own is covered in poisonous dust from drywall or from cutting tiles. Nobody warned me that that would be a thing! Our entire apartment has only three rooms in it, and every single room seems to have had drywall or tiles cut inside it. So now we have to wipe down everything we own. Soooooo we are just running a CR box again.
The trusty CR box... good for more than just wildfires and COVID!!!