Home stuff

It's weekend for me, and today morning I started the day Skypeing with my friend Paivi in Finland. I was on the laptop so I walked around our house with it to show her and Mikko our place through the camera.. They got to see that we still had our Christmas tree up (without decorations though) and they saw the  messy kitchen and random boxes in every room among other things, haha. After the chat I was inspired to clean the kitchen and also did some rearranging in the space between the kitchen and the laundry room. When I was walking through that area earlier, Paivi asked what room that was and I didn't really know what to answer. I had a  book shelf in there and  a bunch of boxes and bags and cleaning stuff and it just looked like we had way too much stuff unorganized. It's not really a room, it's just an extra area where I guess you could have a small breakfast table or something. I didn't have an extra table so I did with what I had. Basically just cleaned the extra stuff, moved the shelf and added a chair and a few small things. It looks so much better now, and I'm just regretting I didn't take a 'before' picture.. oh well, here's what it looks like now. At least Paivi will be able to tell the difference. ;)

As you can see I finally figured how to take the date off of the picture. :P

We haven't really spent any money in home decorations or furniture since moving here in June because we've had a feeling Florida is just temporary and spending money in something we'll be able to keep a year at most is just not worth it when we could use that money into our long term plans. So about 90% of the things in our home is stuff people gave us. I gotta say at times it drives me crazy because a  lot of what we have is not really my style (like the sofa, yuck!) and I love home decorating and going to Ikea and other home stores. Anyway, lately it's been very relieving to actually go through things that we have and take them to Goodwill. When we move to Finland we'll only bring ourselves, our cats and our clothes, and not much else. We'll put a few things here and there into a storage box to get later, but most of our stuff will be given away (since it's not really anything that we would get money selling). We call this the "operation elimination", since we are slowly eliminating things from our home, and the goal is to not bring in anything new. I guess I really need to add the Christmas tree in the elimination list though, hehe. 

I am planning on a few projects including painting some furniture in the next few weeks though. That's something I've never done before and I need a little project to do. I'll just need to study on the paint products and do some planning before I can actually do it. So more to come later about that.

Here's a picture of Sammy earlier this week. He loves boxes and anything he can go in. We put that basket on the floor and he would not leave it before the next morning!

 What a silly cat our Sammy is!

I am hoping to send out my citizenship application next week, and after that, it will be a little waiting game. The average waiting time is five months, so that means we won't make it to Finland in time to take any entrance exams this year. But I'm not too worried about it, we will have things going on over there, I will get a job for a little while, and Chris will attend Finnish classes. So it will all work out. 

Chris is playing Uncharted so I can't concentrate to write any more.. the game is too exciting!! :D