Yep, that’s a big change isn’t it? Once I got used to having nice woodwork everywhere I realized that I had very few big things left that needed to be cut up. There were the countertops, and then everything else is small enough to do in the basement. So we got some odd jobs done. Shampooed a rug, my sister did some painting, and her boyfriend and I cut up my countertops into all the pieces I need to fit my kitchen. They need a little work to be installed right, but the messy part is done.
So as soon as that was done, we brought in 4 cars full of stuff over 2 days. The Suburban wasn’t available to me, but I’ll call this Moving Day Number 5. I crapped up the dining room table immediately.
My policy was always to take all the free kitchen stuff I could get and now I have an awful lot of things so this seemed like the way to make sense of it all. I had to wash construction debris off a lot of it. But somewhere around this point I was getting texts from friends who wanted to see each other on New Year’s Eve. So I said, “Why not come for dinner at my house and stay over?” And would you believe that my friends said yes?
I fiendishly unpacked, washed, and put away all my stuff. I cut shelves down for the custom sized wall cabinets. I put things on shelves. I found the hardware for my bed, assembled it while Tame Impala sang “It’s getting closer” to me on the radio.
I took a moving box full of my grandmother’s Pyrex dishes to the hole in the wall Indonesian restaurant on the corner and then set up a makeshift food warmer. One of my friends said I’m too classy for the
My brave friends had warm clothes and were ready to camp out in a construction site. But instead, they walked into this!
When they walked in I was on a ladder vacuuming the sawdust I forgot about off of the lights in the upstairs hall. This looking like a house thing continues upstairs! But the civility ends a few inches east of the antipasto.
That is Courtesy the Italian store around another corner. Remember, I didn’t just move to South Philly for the fun of having a small house with a tiny yard and no parking. And here are my guests, looking not too traumatized. Don’t tell my grandmother I didn’t use the table pads.
Just before midnight we took a walk, and had the pleasure of watching idiots burning their Christmas trees in the middle of an intersection with tons of lighter fluid (they even threw in the bottle) and no street closures. And of course no cops came because this is Philadelphia. Just drive around it.
We stuck around until the really loud explosions started (still not sure what that was) but there was no crater on this corner at the end of our walk.
There’s a bit of a dark side to having a dinner party with no kitchen sink though. I’ll leave you with this. Happy New Year!
Chad's Crooked House 