During our time at business school That Husband won’t be working, and we’re going to have to work really hard at staying under budget if we want to leave business school without any debt (I won’t be going into detail regarding how this is possible, I know it sounds crazy but we have savings and help from outside sources that will get us there). Happily TH has a guaranteed position as a consultant with Company X right after he finishes his MBA program so we won’t have to spend any time job hunting and stressing that a post-MBA position isn’t going to materialize.

As part of this effort to cut back on unnecessary expenses I decided I was going to dye my own hair, instead of going to a salon like I usually do. I realized it was absolutely necessary after TH took this picture and showed me how nasty my roots have become.

Here is what I started with. TH laughed when I told him I wanted to make a serious face for the picture because that’s what you do when you take a before picture.

Look at those bleached ends and dark roots!

After a considerably long time spent in the hair color aisle I decided on Clairol Natual Instincts 24-Clove. I kind of wish I had gone with something lighter like 18-Medium Golden Brown but oh well!

The problem isn’t with the shade, as you can see, the problem is that I did an awful job of evenly distributing. I used two boxes, just like everyone on Twitter and Facebook advised, but I think my mistake was twisting it all up on the top of my head and stuffing it into a shower cap for the 10 minutes it was supposed to set.

I don’t think these pictures do it justice either. TH agrees that it looks much worse in real life.

I do like the way the shade makes my eyes pop and I’m going to buy another box and try again. This time though, I’m thinking I will cover my body in vaseline, have wet towels at the ready, apply the stuff and then stand there with my hair dripping dye until it’s time to rinse. If it comes out wonky again, I’m just going to go and get it done somewhere.

Anyone else have a better suggestion for how I can ensure a completely even result?

Jessica helped me add a Formspring widget to the side of my blog, so now you can ask me questions directly from the sidebar of That Wife! (Scroll down, you’ll see it on the bottom right side.)

Maybe a kind of silly of me since I’m having a hard time keeping up with the volume already! (393 questions currently in my inbox if you’re wondering). If you don’t see a reply right away, I will get to it someday. I do delete questions pretty liberally, but only if they are repetitive, offensive, expired (sometimes it takes me so long that a question isn’t relevant anymore), or beating a dead horse and then taking it’s tail and whipping it in the face with it, and then ripping it’s teeth out. Like really beating the dead horse to a pulp kind of questions.

Usually, but not always, attaching a name that I recognize from the blog comments on That Wife will mean I’ll get to your question faster. Bonus points if you create a Formspring account and attach your identity to your questions!

When you tell people you are painting you get one of two responses:

I love painting! Great idea!

or

I hate painting and when you move out you’re going to be kicking yourself for doing so.

I really wanted to paint in our last apartment, but TH wasn’t really up for it and I didn’t push the idea any farther. This time, I started talking about painting really early, and started talking about the very real possibility that I would be able to book extra photo sessions during the winter months because of our amazing lighting conditions. Blank white walls are both boring and difficult to expose for, so I pleaded for just one painted wall in the living room.

Kristin of Bien Living Designs was Mrs. Quiche on Weddingbee, and we’ve been growing closer ever since I announced my move to Chicago. She is just about the sweetest person I’ve ever met, and she offered to help us conquer the task of painting. I’m so clueless that a random person off the street probably could have helped me do a better job than I would have done on my own, but it just so happens that Kristin is an interior designer professionally. And I don’t mean she has a business out of her living room, I mean someone pays her actual money to work in an office in downtown Chicago doing interior design. Can you see why I’m crazy lucky that she was willing to help us with this project?

Per FTC guidelines I want to make it clear that she is offering her services as a designer for free, and I am blogging about them, but she didn’t email me and say “If I help you decorate your apartment will you write about me on your blog?”, it was more like “Hey bee friend, I’m a really nice person and I have only met you one time but I want to help you decorate your new apartment because I like helping people.”

Okay so maybe the email didn’t say those exact words but that’s the basic idea.

First up on the decorating list was painting! I wanted to get it done as quickly as possible because I knew it would be a lot easier to do with empty rooms.

This  what we started with. When I emailed her with ideas about decorating the living room I sent pictures of all of the pieces we would have, and told her to go ahead and tell us what paint color to get. The thought of starting the Is this the right color? Maybe one shade lighter? Or darker? discussion stressed me out so I decided to go with whatever she thought was best. Kristin not only offered to help us with the painting, she picked up the paint and brought some supplies from her house so we wouldn’t have to invest in things that we only planned to use once. For the living room she bought PPG Pure Performance eggshell in Summer Suede.

TH also agreed that we should paint the kitchen based on the photo of the kitchen in the model apartment from this post. For the kitchen she chose the color pickling spice.

Kristin said taping edges was a waste of time, so we laid our plastic down and filled our trays and got to work. She carefully went around the edges with a special brush while I used a roller brush quickly fill in the middle. When we made mistakes and got paint on the floorboards and such we quickly wiped it off with a damp rag.

We only had two brushes for the living room but we had some for the kitchen, so Kristin left TH and I to finish the living room while she tackled the kitchen.

Good news, TH walked away from the experience saying that painting really isn’t that bad. Hooray! As long as painting it white again isn’t completely awful I think we’ll be painting future spaces as well. I also need to give That Husband the credit he deserves, he ended up doing much more work than I did. Painting the wall in the living room and above the counters in the kitchen was easy enough that we decided to do a room in the office as well. I’ll show you a picture of the room later because I want you guys to help me what wall vinyl to put on it (if you haven’t seen wall vinyls they look like this or this.)

The finished product! Doesn’t it look amazing?

And Kristin deserves all credit for the painting of kitchen, she did it all herself. It’s so cheery in there now.

Kristin not only did the painting she also pitched in and did a bit of babysitting when That Husband and I were painting. This won’t be the last you see of her smiling face since she’s offered to help with the rest of the decorating once our belongings are put away.

Maybe you want a little bit of Kristin in your life? She has a service called Long Distance Design, where she will work with you to create presentation boards to help decorate your space. If you’re like my mom, you would never need this service. My mom is really creative, she can see a space and picture how different patterns, textures, and colors  would work together to create something beautiful. If you’re like me though, with no ability to visualize how a space can be best utilized, then Kristin’s service would be awesome for you. I really like that she not only makes you presentation boards like this, but she also sends you a list of links where you can buy everything pictured

The regular price for her service is $250, but if you contact her and mention That Wife she’ll do her Long Distance Design for $175 (which I’m pretty sure every other interior designer out there would say is crazy cheap). If anyone ends up hiring her and writes a blog about the experience with before and after I would love to write a post here on That Wife to show everyone how she transformed your space. Kristin is such a sweetheart and I think anyone who hires her will be really impressed with the result!

After what felt like endless discussion back and forth That Husband and I decided to use a company called Compass Van Lines for our move. (Can we take a second and talk about that name? What does it even mean? Maybe they are trying to convey that their vans (trucks) never get lost?)

There are so many options for moving. Throw everything away and pack what you can in suitcases you take on the plane (as TH did when he first moved to Dallas before we were married). Throw most of your stuff away and pack the rest of your belongings in your car (which my friend Janssen just did). We also considered good old U-Haul, and the PODS that all of our friends seem to be using lately. I immediately nixed U-Haul after considering what it would be like to have TH driving the truck while I followed behind with the baby in the backseat all by myself. We almost went with the PODS, but Compass Van Lines ended up costing less and they packed the truck up for us, and will be unloading all of our stuff as well. Win!

The experience in Dallas with the loading was a great one. We had a pile of free stuff in the garage that we let the movers pick through, which made them happy because they walked away with entire garbage bags full of food and clothes, and they were courteous and careful with our stuff. From what TH told me, they took our stuff, drove it to a storage facility, unloaded it, and then left it there until they had enough stuff from other people moving into the area surrounding Chicago (or on the way) to make it worth the drive. Then they load it all up into the same truck and drive up, dropping things off as they go. It’s a great system because we get a full service move for less than other companies quoted us, but it’s probably not the way to go if the thought of being separated from your possessions (and having no idea if all of your possessions will be correctly loaded up again and brought to you) makes you anxious.

They loaded up our stuff on August 26th. Yesterday, September4th, we finally got the call that the truck was almost here. HOORAY!!! (3 exclamation points definitely necessary for such news.)

We’re going to be there at 11 pm to move you in. Okay, well that won’t work since we have to use a freight elevator and loading dock and they won’t let us do it that late at night.

Nevermind, we’re going to stay in _____ tonight, so we won’t be there until tomorrow morning. Expect us at 7 am. We schedule the freight elevator for 7 am.

We wake up on Sunday morning, movers-are-coming-day, and it feels weird to not be getting ready for church. It’s 7 am, now 8, now 9, now 10:30, and finally they call. TH goes downstairs to get them and bring them up so they know the way.

Awesome apartment you have, can we take pictures of the view? Oh yeah, please give us $$$$$. No, we will not give you that money, we already paid it back in Dallas and here is the receipt you gave us that proves this.

Oh, well we don’t have the original receipt with us because we forgot it back in Dallas, and we called our boss and he said that he doesn’t want to go into the office to verify that the receipt is the real deal so we’re going to get a hotel for the night and move you in tomorrow. Well thanks for making us skip church and put away our blow up beds and get all excited about no longer having to eat with our plates in our laps while sitting cross legged on the floor.

This picture, taken on my iPhone, is from our walk home from church last week. I love my boys!

After sitting around with bummed looks on our faces for a few minutes we realized that we still had enough time to get to church, albeit with the singles ward instead of our regular family ward. (LDS wards are divided up into family, single, and sometimes language wards. We heard that there aren’t any Polish wards in Chicago anymore which is sad because I kind of wanted to go!) We walked in right before they started and T1, being only one of two babies in the room, was passed around from pew to pew while all of the students did their best to try to make him laugh and smile.

It’s late Sunday night now, and all we can do is hope that the movers show up as promised to drop our stuff off tomorrow. Though it was fun at first, sleeping on blow up mattresses with T1 in between us on the floor has gotten rather old, and my hips are aching because I spend all of my time at the computer sitting hunched over sitting cross-legged on the floor while I edit photos.

I’ll update this post and let you know how everything turns out. Right now I’m feeling optimistic, hoping that our Labor Day will be spent directing movers, doing a little bit of unpacking, and then hitting up Taste of Polonia 2010 later in the afternoon! TH is salivating over the thought of real Polish sausage, Pierogi, and Polish bread. I am, of course, most excited about all the great photo opps!

Update: It’s 11:00 am and we still don’t have any movers here (actually we haven’t even heard from them yet.) I’m not only bummed because we might not get our stuff today, but because we’re going to have to sit around waiting for them until they call and we might miss Taste of Polonia.

12:21 pm the movers are here! I think things are worked out and we should have everything unpacked in a few hours.

Some things about Sophia:

According to my Top Commenter widget she is the #1 commenter on That Wife

She is one of my favorite readers

I’ve told TH many times that I think she’s brilliant and I can’t understand why she’s still reading my silly ramblings after all this time

Her comments are some of my favorites, always relevant, always detailed, and always incredibly logical

She has commented on this blog over 500 times

Sophia is not her real name, but even when we met in person I still called her that. It confused TH and he kept asking her if we should call her Cortney (her actual name) but I think she knows that by now she will always be Sophia to me!

You can find her very first comment on this post

She used to live in Dallas and we met for the first time right after T1 arrived

She just spent a week in Chicago so we were able to meet in person again this past aweek

I liked taking pictures of her pretty smile and naturally curly hair (yes her hair just “does” that without any work on her part)

This is her blog

The two photos above were taken in my new apartment! The light is just amazing, but the color is a bit wonky so I need to get a gray card.

The photos below were taken in this super special (somewhat secret) garden that’s right outside my building and only accessible to residents. I suspect several of my Chicago photo shoots will take place here.

Not that I wouldn’t love to meet all of you, but frequent, long-time commenters definitely hold a special place in my heart. Some of you have been reading and contributing for an impressively long time, and even if you don’t have blogs of your own, I feel like I’ve been able to get to know you (through your  many many many comments).

The more time I spend on this blog, the more my e-friends become just as important to me as my IRL friends. When I was a crying, sobbing mess due to problems with breastfeeding who did I get in touch with? An e-friend who had a baby boy just a few months before I did. Her emails and IMs meant so much to me and without this lovely little blog of mine I never would have made that connection.

I’m getting all emotional and teary-eyed as I write this. 3 years ago I never could have guessed at the ways blogging would change and shape my life. I feel like we’re all in a big blogging sorority together and I just love you ladies (and the few guys who are reading-I love you too!)