it has been a year!

Today is an anniversary of sorts. No, not our wedding anniversary, though that's coming up too. A year ago today, Christopher and I moved in together.

Can you believe it?? (Dinah sure couldn't! Here are some photos of the place taken last Oct 1) In this day and age, it's totally old fashioned of us not to have lived together until right before the wedding. It makes us look really conservative and hesitant, which was not the case at all. Most of you know our main reason: we were both homeowners and we had to sell and then buy before we could live together. Yes, yes, there are ways around that. But instead of moving once into a rental and settling there and then moving again when we sold and bought, we moved just once.

But oh-my-goodness! it was a year ago! We have lived together an entire year and it didn't seem like a big deal at all. Everyone says that the first year - of marriage, of co-habitation - is the toughest. It didn't seem so bad. Yes, there have been a few of those, "why don't you pick up after yourself?" moments, but neither of us are too wrapped up in judging the other person's habits, so that was not an issue.
Our move: it was completely, horribly stressful. Two days before we closed on this apartment, we closed on the sales of our individual apartments, with a condition that we could live in them for two more days. This caused stress on many fronts, as Christopher's buyer's lawyer neglected to inform his buyer of this, so until a few days beforehand she was planning to move in right after closing. (Ack!) The other stress was that a week before closing on our new apartment, the realtor told us that the owners had decided that they weren't going to move for another month or two, that they were planning to rent our new apartment from us until they could move. In the meantime, we would just have to find someplace temporary to live (in a week? three weeks before our wedding? You've got to be kidding me!)
These turned out to be minor blips. The sellers found a place to live and our lawyer told Christopher's seller that she couldn't move in yet, end of story.
In any case, a year ago today, at this very moment, our movers were still unpacking our stuff from their truck and moving it upstairs. Christopher and I were moving boxes and furniture into the appropriate rooms, taking stock of what we had, wondering where to begin. Looking at the photos, you can see that we've come a long way, both in unpacking (though there are a few straggler boxes still hanging around) and renovating the apartment.