Seattling down

First and foremost - Happy Chinese New Year (CNY) everyone!

祝大家新年快乐，万事如意， 喜气洋洋， 青春洋溢 ！

The last of the well wishes is becoming increasingly important nowadays haha. I take no credit for coming up with all the four worded Chinese phrases - Google helped me plenty lol.

Call me traditional or old-fashioned but I genuinely like CNY and the whole custom thingy we do back in Singapore. From waking up in the morning and greeting the family with well wishes to visiting your relatives whom you only see once a year and probably won't even recognise on the street. Not forgetting the goodies, food, Angbaos (sigh not eligible already) and the opportunity to get away from work. Tell me what's there not to like about CNY!?!

Well, maybe except for the no-washing-hair-on-new-year's-day-cause-you-wash-away-the-luck part that my Dad insists on making us follow.

But anyways, we didn't want to feel left out of all the celebrations happening back at home so we decorated our place.

You ready to meet our apartment?

Haha. Don't worry, the above picture of our empty dining room and those of our house below are the "Before"s. We haven't been living in an empty house for seven months.

Kitchen and dining view from the living room.

Our spacious living room.

Empty Master Bedroom.

The best part of our place - large sliding doors that allow so much light into our apartment!

Large glass doors and windows in our living and dining rooms also give awesome views of the garden.

Living space on the left with kitchen on the right - view from our dining.

We were super excited to finally have our own place when we first got to Bellevue. (Ok, we actually live in Bellevue, which is just a bridge across to Seattle. We tell people we are in Seattle though cause it saves us 13 secs of telling them that Bellevue is in Washington where Microsoft is and that we are just 20 min away from the city full of Grey's Anatomy's hot doctors, i.e. Seattle, which is the nearest most famous place that they have heard of that is near Bellevue.)

Anyway, you would have been happy for us too if you had seen the c̶r̶a̶p̶p̶y̶ vintage-looking rented basement in Provo that we were living in previously. Mummy Rita was so shocked when she saw the place that she sat on the sofa in disbelief for a really, really, really, long time. I remember asking her if she was OK and she said that she felt like she was in the house of the Adam's Family.

So with 10 millions ideas in mind and a Pinterest full of boards full of pins (yes there is no double typo error here Jo), we were all ready to go crazy furnishing our home - until we saw the balance in our bank account. Bah.

See, I stopped working in May to get married and we came to Provo for Mark to finish school. He was scheduled to start work in September but only did so in November because of some visa issues. So we had to acquire things bit by bit and that was when garage sales (read: free stuff) became our best friend. One of the best deals we got was a swing for $25, inclusive of delivery!

It was abit worn out and old but of course we already had something in stored for it =)

I'm surprised how a little revamping works wonders! We also bought a dining set with a HUGE table from Fred Meyer.

It's quite a story of how we got it back to our house though. With all the packing, we got pretty confident that we could stuff anything into our Prius so when the staff at Fred Meyer told us that we would probably have to get someone to deliver our table for $50, we were like - NAH, it's OK, we got it.

After an hour of trying to play 3D Jigsaw puzzle with the 6 piece dining set, we decided that even our trusty Prius has its limits. The gigangtic table top cannot fit means cannot fit, ngeh ngeh force (Verb: to force without regard of cost) also no use.

So we were left stranded with a table, four chairs, one bench and a car 16 blocks away from our home. Damn sian. I thought that we should just pay the $50 already and save ourselves further hassle but Mark insisted that it was not worth it. He said he would push the table top home on a Fred Meyer shopping cart =O

Yeah. =O

Well, I decided that I would not be part of this epic moment so I volunteered to drive the remaining parts of the set home in the Prius. The saddest thing is that in the moment of desperation and chaos, I forgot to snap a picture of Mark in his sorry state haha. That incident is definitely more amusing now on hindsight though.

So after all the buying , Mark got into the handyman mode to do some drilling, fixing and acrobatics.

Plus change car tires cause our tires pumchek (adj: derived from a Malay mispronunciation of "puncture", it is now the default Singlish term for "flat tire" - The Coxford Singlish Dictionary, TalkingCock.com) on the way back from Ikea lol.

And finally, it's all done =)

Do come visit us soon!

Love,

Belle