Things are slowly but surely coming together in the new house. Now that we have our main living area (mostly) done, it’s tempting to leave the rest of the house in boxes…but I guess I’ll just have to woman up and go through it all.

Hopefully we can sell or donate a lot of the stuff we haven’t used in a long time (I’m looking at you, scrapbook stuff and JK’s old textbooks which we both know he will never open again but for some reason he refuses to get rid of).

The living room is almost done, we’re just waiting for our coffee table to arrive and to find a nice chair for the corner. Oh, and we picked up our bed last night – now we can finally stop sleeping on the floor like savages.

I adore our new kitchen. The island gives us so much more room to work with, and this is the first time we’ve tried gas burners. Cooking is fun again!

Bonus: the colors of the floor and the counter tops are both really forgiving. In our old house, every single little errant crumb would show, so ten minutes after I cleaned it, it would look dirty again. Here I can slob with abandon!

As much as I love the kitchen, I have to say that the best part of our new place is the deck. Spending sunny weekends “stuck at home” doesn’t sound so bad anymore now that we have a private space outdoors.

You would think the Wellie’s favorite part would be his new yard where he can happily defend us from rogue squirrels, but no. Nothing can top his unbridled passion for our new rug:

Yup, that’s one strange little nutria.

Things have been quiet on Trail Snail lately, but for once it’s for a good reason – JK and I bought a house! We finally had the opportunity to move from our little townhouse and into a house with an actual yard and a deck. We’ve dreamed about this for years!

I’ll post some real photos when we get all our furniture and stuff set up (and when I can find the camera cable which will inevitably be hidden in the last box I open), but for now I’ll post a couple of cell phone snaps and get back to marinating in all this new house love.

It feels like a vacation retreat* for us, and I find myself not wanting to even hike(!) because I’m perfectly content puttering around the neighborhood.

Maybe next week some of the newness will wear off and I can return to the world outside of my little bubble, but for now I will happily call myself a homebody.

*Did I mention the hot tub? Oh heavens yes. I’ve never been in a totally private hot tub before, but man alive are those things more enjoyable when you don’t have to worry about other people catching a glimpse of your billowing blubber amidst the bubbles.

Depression isn’t something you just suddenly snap out of; for me it’s been more of a gradual awakening. For every week that goes by my head feels a little bit clearer, my soul a little bit lighter, and I am starting to feel like I really want to participate in the world again. I feel like I wasted age 18-25 and now I just want to make up for everything that I missed.

After years of not caring about much of anything at all, I’m trying to put the pieces of my life back together.

One of the big things for me is to make our little townhouse feel more like a home, so we’ve spent a lot of time over the last couple of weeks decluttering and organizing stuff. Now that I feel less cluttered as a person, I want our house to reflect that as well. Oh, and it would also be nice to be able to have people over without having to spend an hour cleaning first. Yeah…

Now that we have some progress in our living room, I decided to take some photos. The fact that I now keep the blinds on our windows completely open feels oddly significant (please stop me if I sound like a self-help book); I used to keep them shut all the time and just hide in my dark little cave.

I just got the new IKEA catalog in the mail and I think a shopping trip is in order (have I mentioned how much I hate shopping). I want to put a little bookshelf in the corner between the fireplace and the stairs to help contain the ever-growing mess that is my library – I’ve been good and very strict and am selling/donating all the books except my all-time favorites and the ones I know I am going to read again, but we still don’t have enough shelf space.

If we can fit it in our ridiculously narrow living room, I also want a comfy chair that would complete a circle around our coffee table. Now it just feels so tv-centric.

It feels so nice and light and airy in here now, I love it! My next project will have to be to make the bedroom feel the same way so we can wake up and feel good about ourselves every morning. Unfortunately this means going through the imposing mountain of ill-fitting clothes that is taking up all the space in my closet and sorting them for trash and donation. Bah!