Moving in!

Monday afternoon we signed our lease and picked up our keys - it was pretty late and they said they wanted to give the unit a final clean before we moved in, so we headed back to the hotel for the night.

The next morning we arrived bright and early to our empty apartment.

Backpackers no more!

It's incredibly hard to take photos of an empty house and not have it look tiny, so just trust me, the place is huge :)  Here's a few photos...

Lounge/dining, with "cappucino bar" (apparently it's cool to call it that nowadays rather than "breakfast bar") to the kitchen.

Kitchen - the fridge and the dishwasher come included :)

View of the city from the second bedroom.

Now that we had an empty place, it was time to start furnishing!

We don't have a car (and we're not planning on getting one), so we invested in some carbon-footprint friendly moving technolgies ;)  Unfortunately, this one's a little short for us tall folk, we so might need to extend the handle or buy a new one.

Lacking any other option, we hit up the local Walmart (sorry Liz) to get started with making the place liveable:  crockers, cutlery, chopping boards, an inflatable bed to serve until ours arrives on Sunday, and the sheets and pillows for it.

And we were set!  (Unfortunately, we froze to death as that's a thin cotton blanket, and it was cold - we were trying to hold out until our doona arrives from Australia.  I'm not sure how Canadian hot water heating works, but I have a suspicion that ours isn't working properly.  Needless to say, today we bought a backup doona.)

Would you believe our apartment comes with a fridge but no shower curtain?  I picked up this awesomely tacky one after managing to soak the entire bathroom taking a shower earlier.

Random photo:  they sell milk in BAGS here!  I'm not sure what exactly you're supposed to do with a 4L bag of milk.  How do you pour it?  How do you store it?  Very strange!

In true Lane family tradition, we celebrated the move-in with pizza on the floor for our move-in dinner :)

Since then we've had another trip to Walmart for some more essentials - pots and pans, a shower curtain, emergency doona, cooking utensils, glasses, and a bin.

Yesterday (move-in day) we called up and asked about getting the internet connected, and they said sure - you can have 3 months of internet free as a move-in bonus.  We were super-happy with this, but even better, the guy said "I'll have a technician out to you tomorrow morning to get it connected".  So the technician rocked up this morning, and by 11:30am we were connected and going - and it's super-fast.  Awesome!

So here Stephen is cooking dinner in our new place!

We've been having some trouble finding furniture - we bought a bed pretty easily (despite the week's wait for delivery), but everything else is incredibly expensive.  I was initially hoping to buy some cheap second-hand stuff on Craigslist, but that's proving impossible, so then I wanted to hit up something like Fantastic Furniture or Super A-Mart for some cheap tables and chairs and desks, but they don't seem to exist.  Tomorrow we'll try Ikea and see how that pans out.

More photos once our rooms actually have stuff in them!