We will miss you!

My parents just left after having spent 13 days with us, and we are so sad to see them leave. There were enormously helpful with so many things.
We had made a very long ToDo list of more than 40 items to do around the house and we managed to knock off most of them in very little time. We made a few trips to Ikea, Home Depot, Bad Breath & Behind and finally feel like we are no longer living in boxes.
We also managed to have some fun, like a picnic, trips to local restaurants, a SF Giants game, the baptism at the Norwegian Seamens Church, and a little trip on Skyline in the Miata.

New apartment walkthrough

New apartment from Pete Hansen on Vimeo.

Carpet update II

This un-retouched picture shows the difference between clean and dirty carpet. The clean part is lighter patch closest to the door, the dirty part is closest to the hose. Keep in mind that the clean part is wet and therefor darker than normal.

We finally had our carpets cleaned this morning. What a bliss! and the apartment is once again a huge mess! A team of professional carpet cleaners spent about an hour using hot steam and the chemical called Sodium tripolyphosphate which sounds worse than it is according to Wikipedia. Since they didn't use any soap or shampoo the dirt that will fall onto the carpet in the time to come will not adhere to the soap residue and accumulate. 

Having spent a few hours walking around on the still wet carpets, our feet are clean, and that terrible "new carpet smell" that gave me a sore throat, is mostly gone also. 

The cleaner dude who ran the machine said the carpets looked quite dirty, he showed me a patch of clean carpet next to the dirty and it was quite noticeable.  I took a photo, naturally, which I will post later. (Update: see photo above) 

All we have to do now is wait until the carpets are dry before we can put our stuff back and continue packing out. That also means we cannot put Lucia down on the floor today, and have to hold her all the time. 

:(

Carpet Updates

It's been changing by the hour over here:

Carpets were being cleaned Wednesday a.m.
Then I called the carpet cleaner to make sure the chemicals were safe. He said he was sure they were safe, because they were made in the US. I laughed a lot at that answer. So is um, DEET, Chlorine bleach, hydrocloric acid and about a million other totally toxic chemicals. The dude also didn't know about our particular problem and uh, how to fix it. He just knew that our landlord called him to come clean the carpets.

Not particularly helpful.

So our landlord tells us that the carpet cleaners will use whatever we want.

I call Stanley Steamer Carpet Cleaner, they said to use sodium tripolyphosphate, which alarmingly is in Kraft Mac N' Cheese, but is otherwise completely safe for households with babies and dogs.

Sweet. We tell our landlord what to use. He asks where we can get it. I'm like I'M NOT A CARPET CLEANER!!! Thinking if your carpet guy doesn't know where to get chemicals, I'm pretty sure he's uh, a terrible carpet cleaner.

Mind you, the carpets have already been steam cleaned.

So our landlord says to go ahead with Stanley Steamer, but to get a quote first.

This is frustrating.

So now we called SS and they're coming today from 10-12 for a whopping $176. Done and done.

We're really hoping this is the end of our carpet woes and we can move on to enjoying our apartment.

Finally online again!

We have been siphoning off Whole Food's wireless network for a while which has been slow and intermittent. Today a repair man from AT&T hooked the building onto their network again since the cables got cut some time before we moved in. (!)
He was also very kind to fix the outlets inside for free, they had been painted over and rendered useless in several other ways.

As Heather mentioned in the previous post, the carpets have been a disaster. They are brand new so they have that VOC (Volatile Organic Compound) related new-carpet-stink, but they also give us dirty feet.

Check out this photo on the right, it shows one washed foot and one that has been walking around for two hours inside the apartment..
I worry about the fumes from the carpets the most since my throat is constantly sore and I am worried that Lucia may be harmed also, she play all day so close to the carpets, but I take comfort in the fact that the landlord has been very responsive and I believe the matter will be solved within a week or two. I am also happy we got an air cleaner today with an active coal filter and an HEPA filter. It seems to work pretty well, it took most of the VOC stink out of Lucia's room – in addition to that other stink.

The apartment is still a mess, but we keep emptying boxes so we should be done soon. We even made dinner here for the first time today!

Goodbye Mountain View Apartment

So we're moving out tomorrow. While I'm really excited to be moving to a bigger place, I'm also feeling reflective and a teensy sentimental for our old place, despite it's problems.

We moved here when we had been married for just 4 months. We moved out of my first apartment in San Francisco, which was an amazing amazing amazing (yes, it bears repeating) penthouse apartment that was about 800 square feet. It was one giant room, with French doors leading to the bedroom. Unfortunately, Pete the night owl would want to stay up late and do stuff, and since I was commuting 80 miles round trip for my job, I had to get up insanely early every day, so I wanted to go to bed early. This proved to be a challenge. Also, Pete had no where to work -- I had cleaned out a huge closet for him and we made it his office, but that didn't really work, since it was only about three feet wide. I still think it was very generous of me to give up closet space.

Anyway, so our criteria in looking for our apartment in 2007 was: 2BR, closer to my office, and maybe a pool and fitness center. After a frustrating search by me (since Pete was in the city) after work and on the weekends for both of us, we found this place. It had kind of a retro 70s feel, which we later discovered was in fact just because they did a haphazard job of "remodeling."

We moved in June 2007. We also started receiving crazy amounts of wedding presents at this time, and we bought our new table and chairs, and our sofabed then. We were thrilled to have two bedrooms; Pete had a real office, and our apartment had full doors so I could just go to bed early and he could stay up as late as he wanted (something he still enjoys doing, despite my prodding).

We experienced a 5.6 earthquake here in October of 2007, where I was terrified to discover our walls move like a parallelogram; we went to our wedding and to the dude ranch and to Detroit, all while living in this apartment. We also had some scary interactions with shady neighbors and I fell in love with He-Man the cat.

Possibly the greatest achievement, and the thing that makes me a teensy sentimental, is that we made and grew Lucia here. We made those funny videos and had her and brought her home here. This is where it all happened. The pictures of me pregnant in front of the stove. Bringing Lucia up the stairs for the first time; here. All here.

I never thought this would be the place for all of that; I'm excited to see what the next chapter of our lives and the next apartment will bring.

New street

Our new apartment is the one with the red car parked out side. (Click on the picture)