We're back–if we were ever gone

We’re having some problems getting this post to work. We don’t care.
My apartment’s going on sale today–the week that The New York Times officially called the Manhattan housing market not good. Some people, basically everybody we know, called us obsessive for renovating a perfectly nice apartment. Since the paper of record says you should renovate to sell, they call us foresighted.

Our host company had problems. We don’t know why the “iconic” pinup is gone. However….We have it back.
We’re too happy to have our archives to bear a grudge. It’s just that when we said we were going to shake up our life, we wanted our blog to be part of our new life.

We hadn’t realized Courting is our real home. As long as we have our blog we can live anywhere. Not true but it sounds good.

We lost some posts that talked about our very chaotic move. Briefly it took fourteen hours to get here. We arrived to a disaster. The townhouse next door had their water heater in the attic. It exploded. Our friend’s downstairs kitchen, dining room and living room floors had to be replaced.

Bobby our newest BFF the project manager said fixing this house was like “what’s that show?” “Extreme Home Makeover.” “Right, hon.”

Bobby accomplished in two days what took us four months to do to our apartment, and we didn’t have to constantly give him more money and tell him not to take out the recessed lighting in the kitchen as we like it and we wanted to focus on the things that bring in money–a reglazed bath tub, new paint, great sanded floors, new door knobs. We knew what to do and what not to do, but we only own the apartment.

Basically we spent four months being contractor to the contractor and totally appreciate professionals. We did bring in a professional but he too had his hand out constantly. We understand how high the cost of living is in New York and that people think if a person’s renovating to sell they will make millions. We know our apartment has limitations and won’t. Hence we wanted it to look as perfect as possible. We’re so happy to be out of the city of “gimme, gimme more.”

We did take our own furniture, rearrange and “staged” it amazingly, if we must say so ourselves. Our mother’s best friend, an interior designer, always told us we had the eye and whatever else is needed to be an interior designer. We didn’t think it intellectual enough and were scared of graphs. Now we could do the graphs on computer and think it a great occupation.
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We would like to remind people as it doesn’t seem to be talked about that in less than two weeks the US will have been in Iraq for five years. Five years too long.