Days 9 and 10

So, the house started to look like people live there (people who have boxes instead of furniture, but not people who only have tools and dropcloths, so that's an improvement).

The best part right now is definitely the kitchen.  Here's how it looked tonight (bonus points if you can identify the cone atop the cabinets.  Clue: it's not a dunce cap.  Answer below.):

Note the drainboard is out, and a whole bunch of other stuff.  Tonight (Day 10) we went to the house after work (We are going back to work now, instead of spending all day, every day at the house.  Not sure if this is an improvement or not, but c'est la vie.).  We spent a couple hours opening boxes of kitchen things, washing them, and finding places for them.  On Day 9, I was pretty freaked out that nothing would fit and we'd completely overflow the cabinets with all of our kitchen stuff.  How could two people (not 10, not 30) own so much stuff?!  But today we got much more of it organized and it's mostly fitting.  We washed glasses.  I can't believe how many kinds of glasses: champagne flutes, white wine glasses, red wine glasses, pilsner glasses, gorgeous glass beer mug things that I can't describe but which are from Simon Pearce and are actually beautiful.  Here's what we can't find: the pint glasses, which are our regular drinking glasses.  Andrew's friend Matt says that tells us what we ought to be drinking, but since I like milk and Anthony's all about the water, we hope they turn up.  Milk looks funny in a pilsner glass.

The new thing in the kitchen is all the hardware.  In the last set of pictures, you had to pry the cabinets open with your fingernails.  Not so now.  Check out the sleek new handles and our pretty little knobs:

 Perhaps you can't tell from the pictures, but we're actually making headway on the piles of boxes.

The ones on the right in this picture are all books.  The ones on the left are other things.  But the piles are lower and there's room to walk now, so that's an improvement.

The living room is still overrun with boxes and furniture, sadly.

We haven't uncovered the bottom level yet.  There are a couple of places where we want to work on the trim some more, and the office needs some touch-ups.  But it looks very different!  The vast majority of the tools are gone, the camp chairs are folded up, and you can actually see what a big room the soon-to-be-gym is.

In the next few days we'll keep unpacking, put up the four bookcases that are going in the living/dining rooms, and put the books on them.  Then we should finally have enough floor space to arrange the furniture.

Also coming up: a very organized utility room, courtesy of Anthony.

Answer: The cone on top of the cabinets is the form on which one makes a croquembouche, the traditional French wedding cake, made of many tiny cream puffs encircled in spun sugar, that we chose for our own wedding, and that Anthony makes me for birthdays because he is perfect.