Home Sweet Home?

We're finally done driving (sound of raucous applause)! We made it to Portland around 4:00 on Friday afternoon.  We were assured our place was emptied, cleaned and prepared for our move-in, so we stormed in, guns-ablazin'.  We quickly discovered that the apartment was indeed emptied, but not cleaned...at all.  

We moved everything in (since the idea of our earthly belongings spending one more vulnerable night in a truck on the street scared us)  and started to clean around it all.  And here I am, finally coming exiting my haze of cleaning products and into the fresh Portland air.  I'm still not convinced the place is clean to my standards (which make me look more and more like the F.R.I.E.N.D.S character Monica Gellar every day) but it's close to livable now.  I still need to sweep and mop, but that will have to wait until the key to our storage unit arrives and we can move those items out of the way.  

The total tallies of cleaning products used:

10 Mr. Clean Magic Erasers (not even kidding..TEN)

2 Large bottles of Goo Gone

4 Rolls of paper towels (rags were filthy after the first wipe and I couldn't clean them fast enough)

1 gallon of vinegar

1 container of dish soap

1 box of baking soda

1 bottle of hydrogen peroxide

2 cups of bleach 

Seriously...it's clean now, I swear.  

Aside from being excessively grimy, the place seems like it will work.  It definitely feels much smaller than we were hoping, but I guess that's what you get when you sign the lease sight unseen.  It's in a building from 1910, with an Otis elevator from 1889.  Don't try to do the math, it's illogical any way you  look at it.  I like to imagine a large elevator towering in the middle of the block, then someone built the building around it.  The apartment living space is small, but the closet: Narnia!  It's insanely huge.  It's more than "walk-in."  We have two dressers in there, and that only takes up a quarter of the space.  We also get a storage locker in the basement which seems to be about the size of our old bathroom.  The neighborhood is pretty fun too.  We're definitely not in Pilsen anymore.  There's a ton of restaurants and bars on our street.  Two blocks away there's tons of shopping.  Paper Source, Pottery Barn, Trader Joe's, hip clothing boutiques and the "Best Ice Cream in Portland" apparently reviewed as such by the New York Times, although I can't find the review, haha.  Anyway, it'll be a fun change of pace.  We're still waiting on our own internet, and getting things in their place, then photos will be shared.