Mmmmm... lingonberries...

It was a busy (not to mention coughy, sneezy and achy) weekend here in Chicago. I spent much of Friday on the couch, fighting off the virus that took hold last week -- leaving me NO doubt whatsoever that I was in the middle of a bad cold (and definitely not allergies). Rick, meanwhile, spent most of the day at the new condo, overseeing the final Operation Update Condo projects. We've now had the hardwood floors refinished, new carpet installed in the master bedroom, carpet removed from the study and replaced with wood floors, and new paint in the entryway, study and bedroom.

Refinished floors (I know it's hard to tell from the pictures, but the floors look SO much better now than they did at first...).

New wood floor and red paint in the study...

This was the OLD bedroom carpet and paint (it looked even worse in person... the carpet was just... ick...)

And here's the NEW carpet and paint. And, from another corner of the room, you can see --

My purple accent wall!! Yeah, that's right -- I have a purple wall in my bedroom. Finally. (I don't even KNOW how I convinced Rick to allow a purple wall in the bedroom... I'm not gonna ask... I'm just going with it... :))

Anyway... these really aren't very good pictures -- I need to take some with my good camera, instead of my little point-and-shoot (which doesn't have a very wide-angle lens). But the good camera is still here at the rental condo, for last-minute skyline pictures...

Saturday brought more couch time, and then I drank my weight in Dayquil and forced myself to join Rick at the new condo to wait for a furniture delivery -- we got a new bed and a smaller kitchen table (we're going to keep the table we have now in storage, because it really is a nice piece of furniture... but for now, we're trying to downsize...). We paid for the delivery guys to assemble the bed, but we were told the table was easy to assemble, so we should save the money on the assembly and do it ourselves. Which brings us to...

Sunday, I woke up feeling MUCH better. (I am no longer convinced that this cold virus is determined to multiply to the point that it becomes an entity unto itself and can achieve world domination. No, on the contrary -- it shall be destroyed.) And since I was feeling better, we decided to take a little field trip out to the suburbs and visit IKEA. If you've never been to an IKEA, it is quite the experience. And this particular IKEA is even bigger than the IKEA we had back in Austin. It's like a giant home improvement warehouse maze, with Swedish meatballs in the middle. (Since I am part Swedish, I feel that I should appreciate Swedish food... yet in reality I find most of it rather unappealing... Although I DID think the bottles of sparkling lingonberry-apple juice they had at the register sounded pretty good...) We browsed through the kitchen remodel displays to get ideas for sometime down the road (we want to eventually redo the kitchen in the condo, but for now we'll make do with what we have...), and then we found the reason for our trip -- we bought two big bookcases to place along one wall of the living room. And like most of the items at IKEA, the bookcases were sold unassembled, and each bookcase was contained in FOUR separate boxes. Since we bought two bookcases, this meant eight big, cumbersome boxes that we had to wrangle into our SUV, drive back to our building, and then transport to the elevator and up to our condo. That was fun. Let's just say that we got in a good workout after that experience...

Fortunately, we had the presence of mind to NOT attempt to assemble the bookcases right away. But we did assemble the kitchen table. And it WAS pretty simple to put together... or at least it WOULD have been, had we not discovered that one of the table legs was defective. (Doesn't it always seem to work that way??) But I have to give credit to West Elm (where we bought the bed and table) -- Rick called them as soon as we discovered the defective table leg. And even though they were about to close, they told us to bring the table leg to the back entrance of the store and they'd exchange it for us, no problem. It made what could've been a really annoying issue much less annoying... plus we took a break to get dinner next-door at Epic Burger (where I always get the chicken... which, according to Rick, is much better than their burgers... so perhaps they should be Epic Chicken??) -- so everything worked out okay.

And now that I'm writing all of this, I realize I should've taken a picture of the finished kitchen table... but I guess I'll wait until the kitchen CHAIRS come in (they're backordered). And now that I've babbled on aimlessly for a while, I guess I should go find some stuff to pack up -- we have one more week of moving ourselves until the movers arrive!