March 6, 2009

• Settled In: First photos of my new home

  The last of the boxes have been unpacked, and I'm pretty much settled in. DirecTV was hooked up last weekend and internet service was installed yesterday afternoon. Following are photos of my place as it looked after I got moved in and how it now looks after unpacking.

  

  The boxes were piled in the living room when I moved two weeks ago. This shot was taken on February 22nd. The view is looking into the living room area from the dining room. First I positioned all the racks and bookshelves, then unpacked the boxes, and finally I filled the curio cabinets with my collectibles.

  

  I'm sitting at my newly reassembled computer desk in the (still unfinished) computer room at the back of the house. As mentioned in the previous entry, this desk gave us some trouble moving it out of the old house.

  

  Feb 22nd. The shelves and curio cabinets at the end of the living room area. The TV is to go to the right against the wall separating the living room from the kitchen. I contemplated painting the "Gumby green" bookcase units which hug the corner, but I began filling them first, with plans perhaps to paint them in future. The manilla envelopes piled to the left of the green bookcase are my collection of "Fall Issues" of the TV Guide magazine, dating back to 1967.

  

  My little area of the world. I've filled most of the curio cabinets, and I've got most of my wall hangings and pictures arranged on the walls. I left the HDTV in the old house until the 27th, cause I was paid up till the 28th, and that was the day they installed the DirecTV dish on my back lawn. (It's too large to mount on the top of a mobile home I was told. ) This shot is taken from the couch. I still need to get a sofa for the other wall along which my LazyBoy sits, directly in front of the TV you'll notice. My new neighbor, when visiting, called it my "captain's chair".

  

  The lone couch sits in back of the coffee table. My button and badge collection is in the beer serving tin on the right of the coffee table, and large magazines are stored on the lower shelf. The candy dish is filled with root beer barrels. The other sofa (when I get it) will sit catty corner to this one agains the wall to the right. 

  

  A view of my Southwestern lamp, with it's lit diorama framed by curio cabinets. While the "Betty Boop Museum" occupied my "back rooms" in the old place, the curios are front and center in my new home. Most everything is behind glass so it doesn't have to be dusted.

  

  Here is a view of the living room from the ceiling next to the sliding patio door. The blue rug is original, and was highly stained. However I got a good carpet cleaner to professionally clean the carpets in the whole house for only $120.00, which was a bargain. I have the oval rug in front of the TV, as in the old house, and there will be another rug under the dining table when I'm done.

  

  Here is the dining room shot from the lving room.

  

  My bedroom. Since there's a window above the bed, I can't put shelving as my headboard as in the old house, but so far I'm finding a "place for everything". My CD collection that isn't in the jukebox changer is stored to the right of the bed, since I didn't have any more room in the living room area!

   

  This is the pantry/washing area looking into the hall from the kitchen. I began filling the kitchen and refrigerator just yesterday, and plan to "eat in" this weekend. I still haven't hooked up the dryer, but the washer is hooked up. Not a lot of space, but I'm utilizing it the best I can. You can see the other green bookcase up against the hall wall, housing my paperback book collection.

  

  The computer room is still in an unfinished state, and I'll be arranging it this coming weekend. Here is the writing desk and media storage cabinet. My computer desk peeks from the right of the photo. The big entertainment center in the corner is what I use for CD Rom storage and some of the electronics which connect to the computer, like my VCR and the other record player. It was made custom especially for me back in 1993 for my first bigscreen TV, a 32" Toshiba tube television. The TV is long gone, but I can't bear to part with the entertainment center.

  

  The computer desk. The back room was where I stacked all the collectibles boxes, which were the first things I moved into the new home, and the last things to be unpacked.

   

  I took lots of photos of the Betty Boop Museum in the old house, so I could duplicate the displays, but I decided to create completely new displays when I got situated. This is the bottom shelf of the curio cabinet next to the couch. Betty at the microphone just happens to be the very first Danbury Mint Betty collectible I ever purchased, sometime in 1995.  The Betty figurine in back is the very first figurine I bought, back in 1977!

  

  This is the bottom shelf of the tall curio cabinet shown to the left of the green bookcase in Photo #4. The "Goldy Box" in the center of this section is one of two I have had since my youth. My mother created the "Goldy Boxes" by pasting small coins, curios, and toys to the sides and top of a cigar box, then sprayed the whole thing gold. I've had the boxes for many years, but they were in storage, and the tops were packed separate from the boxes themselves. Some of the curios had worked themselves loose, and I found all the pieces and put them back together again. My mother also crocheted the yarn octopus, which has been a part of my home since it was placed in my bedroom back when I was in high school.

  

  This section of the Betty Boop Museum is the bottom shelf of the curio cabinet to the right of the HDTV. Besides Betty Boop, Gumby, and Groucho figurines, my CSF and high school pins are sitting below Groucho.

  More photos can be found in the album "Settled In: March 2009" in my Photoblog. Now that I'm pretty much settled, and since I've got internet service, I expect to be blogging a bit more regularly. On the hip replacement front, since my referral lapsed while I was in the process of moving, the operation still hasn't been scheduled, and will probably not happen till after May!

  • 10:02 am
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