Taking steps, out and about inside my building - I live in a studio which is absolutely perfect for me, space-wise and location-wise.

I'm standing on the level of my front door, around the corner from it--this loop in the hallway is 67 of my steps around. I could take the steps down to the vestibule seen through that closed door or up to the second floor landing. I knew yesterday that it's time to take a walk up those stairs. Right at my fingertips, well, at my feet, the perfect way to get moving more and more on this road to recovery from surgery a week ago yesterday! To put some variety in my work out, complete with the safety of a handrail.



Ever curious, I decided to find online a diagram of wooden staircase parts so that I would know the exact name of what my hand grasped, of where my feet landed. I like a sturdy handrail connected to well-installed balusters. To tell you the truth, my all-time-fantasy hiking trail in the outdoors would come with just such a set up. I believe that my fear of heights would be negated as I held onto such a handrail.



Here's a direct look up the eleven treads in this riser, counting the landing at the top as eleven. Is that the way you count, officially as a carpenter? It's how I count as a walker.



At the top I turned left, looked out through the screen and took this photo. You can see the tile roof on the building's entrance, there to the right. The windows on the lower level on the left are mine! I have a total of eight, four in each room.



The first three you see are part of the four that make up the bonus room's outer wall--my twin bed, a narrow storage unit; a waist-high,long, narrow bookcase; and a chest of drawers are in there, too. This is a photo I took of the bonus room that first day, checking out the apartment. FYI, that silver vehicle across the street is the one whose alarm went off yesterday from approximately 3:30 p.m. until 5:09 p.m. when it ceased. Hallelujah!



There is an extra-wide opening with no door straight across from my bed which opens into my kitchen. I've gotten used to sleeping through the occasional refrigerator gurgle and/or electronic whir. Here you are looking through that opening and out the windows. You can see the building's entrance and the gutter. When we get a lot of rain, it sounds like I'm sleeping behind a waterfall. I love it!



In that photo taken from the upstairs landing, the one window you see at the start of the bow-window area is the first of the four in the living room. There is a bit of wall in between first one and the center two. That bit of wall is repeated between those center two and the fourth one at the opposite end of the bow. These windows grabbed hold of me when I first walked through the apartment's front door, sunshine streaming onto the hardwood floors. This is a photo of the center two windows and the fourth one--I took it on that same day when I first saw what turned out to be my new home.

Two Hansons, Lamont and I, took a trip to Ikea on Presidents' Day in his big ol' Volvo wagon, but we didn't eat Swedish meatballs for lunch.

Daunting task. Those two words fit shopping at Ikea. Not that I wasn't prepared. On Sunday I photographed the spaces where I felt I needed additional storage in my kitchen. I measured those spaces, then printed the photos and wrote the measurements on each one. Then I went to Ikea online to check out what was available. Having done so allowed me to relax a little bit about looking throughout the gargantuan 280,000 square foot building. I took this photo right after Lamont pulled into one of the 1,200 parking spaces! Thanks to getting almost all of mine and Mama's deposit back from our previous apartment (due to the great cleaning help of our friend Sarah and the length of occupancy--over four years), I had a decent budget for this shopping trip.


I figured shelves could go on the wall over the sink. Please note where the dish drainer is sitting. That is the only counter-top-like surface that came with the apartment, and it's so low that if it were really a counter top that I had to use, my back would soon be bothering me on a regular basis. In fact, that's why you see the pink dish pan sitting on top of a plastic covered wire shelf--I can wash dishes without bending over thanks to my creative problem solving skills! By the way, the two blue squares stuck on the back wall of the sink are some sort of plastic pieces that one of Mama's physical therapists gave her to use when opening jars and/or bottles. They stick to the porcelain sink very well and work like a charm.


Lamont is closely observing a Grundtal Wall Shelf and several attachments.

We got two of the shelves, which are stainless steel and measure 47 1/4" wide by 10 5/8" deep by 7 7/8" high.

We also got the Grundtal Dish Drainer, 16 1/8" wide by 10 1/4" deep by 13 3/8' high. You can see it on the right side of the photo with a couple of plates and a bowl in it. There is plenty of room to hang it so that it will drip into the sink or onto the drainboard.

Lamont's looking at the Grundtal Wall Rack/Dish Drainer. It doesn't slant like the larger dish drainer, but I know that I can find several ways to use it to my advantage. I got two of them.

I got two packages of S hooks to use on these shelves, plus two Grundtal Cutlery Caddies which are a flower pot sort of shape made of polypropylene which hangs in a stainless steel frame and hook. I got two of them.

This is a stainless steel Cutlery Caddy. It will either hang from a Grundtal or sit somewhere.


This is a stainless steel Kitchen Utensil Rack. I got one of these for taller utensils. I figure that I will wish I had a couple of them before I'm done.


Here's the white wooden cabinet with the enameled metal top. Today when we got home from Ikea, I cleaned it out and cleaned off the top except for the microwave and the toaster oven as you can see. I knew that I needed to get it ready for whenever they show up to take it out of here.


This is a photo I took at the store of the splendid free-standing cabinet that I got to take the place of the white wooden cabinet. It's called Varde Drawer Unit and measures 41 3/4" wide by 25 5/8" deep by 35 3/8" high. I can't wait for the maintenance man or men to move their piece out of here so that Lamont can put this one together and set it up in the kitchen. I will have a countertop at the correct height! The wood is birch, the drawer fronts are covered in stainless steel.

Above the Varde Drawer Unit, Lamont will hang two of these Broder stainless and galvanized metal shelves and the suspension rail, wall uprights and brackets necessary to attach the shelves to the wall. The shelves are 31' wide by 14 1/4" deep. We got the wall uprights that will hold two shelves spaced just right for whatever use. This photo is one that I cropped from a four-shelf set-up. Lamont will not arrange my shelves exactly like this, but it gives you the idea.


At first I thought I wanted a shelf over the stove, one to which we could attach an under-the-cabinet fluorescent light that I already have. But as we walked along I thought better of it, realizing how disgusting a wooden shelf would soon be over the top of a stove. And since I moved in, that light fixture has been sitting on top of the frig with its light shining up into the ceiling, providing a great amount of overall light. I decided to leave it there.

I got a Grundtal Rail which is 31 1/2" wide. Lamont will hang it over the stove and then hang one of the Grundtal Wall Rack/Dish Drainers on it and/or some S hooks to support some of my smaller sauce pans. We'll see.

Naturally today Ikea was packed with entire families, walking from one display to another taking in--and I quote their Web site --the 9,500 unique Ikea products set up in the 48 inspirational room settings and three complete model homes. While those homes ranged from not much over 700 square feet to not much over 200 square feet, I have to admit what can be done with all of this stuff amazed me.

We'd been there about an hour and a half, looking at my photos and at things I had found online and things I hadn't found online which might work here or there, when all of sudden I told Lamont I really needed to eat something. We made our way through the rest of the maze in another 30 minutes and came to the Ikea Restaurant which seats 250! The line snaked and snaked, populated with entire families and an amazing amount of noise. I looked up at Lamont and declared that I would happily soldier on.

We found somewhere to sit down in an inspirational room--a dining and kitchen combo--and looked through our notes, then he went back downstairs to the entrance to get a shopping cart so that we could pick up all of the pieces and boxes that we figured would work in the apartment. The Varde had to be picked up at the nearby Ikea Furniture buildong which we had passed on our way there. By the time we got to Killer Burger so that we could eat an exceptional American hamburger and French fries, we had been gone for four hours! We needed nourishment in the worst way, and Killer Burger supplied it successfully.


And once we got everything inside the apartment except for the Varde because right now there is no where to put it until the other cabinet is removed, Lamont put together a nightstand on casters which I had found online; it's perfect for my printer because it fits just right beneath my computer table and can be rolled out for scanning and or copying. Oh, the name of the series for the nightstand is Odda. Fits me to a T with that name, doesn't it?

Lamont also put together the Grundtal stainless steel shelves and held them to the walls, eyeballing where to put them so that I can reach things; he did the same with the Broders, too. Tomorrow he plans a trip to a hardware store to search out the proper hanging-the-shelves-on-the-wall items.

Before you know it, I'll have a kitchen fit for a queen, all organized.

A suprising February sunrise

For a few minutes Tuesday morning I ate my oatmeal on autopilot, seated at the kitchen table, enthralled by this sunrise. Glorious.