The Little Things

The funny thing about when you move into an empty apartment with way too many clothes and no furniture is that you literally have no furniture.  Doing laundry almost daily means those three pair of underwear always end up at the top of your pile so you cycle through them constantly.  Blue, black, tan, blue, tan, black, blue, black...

We found a furniture store near our apartment with four large tents out in front of their shop.  It looked like they were doing some inventory reduction.  The prices told a different story.  We bought a rug to cover our marble flooring.  It was a sea of marble, which is beautiful, but monotonous.

After some thought we decided to go for it.  Well, it paid off!  We may have overpaid, but you will overpay for almost everything here in Korea.  I paid 300,000 Korean Won and the owner asked for our address so it can be delivered.  (Almost everything can be delivered here in Korea.  Check out our friends' blog post to prove it.  You can even see us in some of the pictures.)  I told the owner that I would just carry it home as our apartment is just around the corner.  She said, "Really? It's heavy." in Korean and I just flexed my muscles.  She must have known better because she helped me carry it to her car so we could put it in the trunk.

We ended up also "buying" a bowl which turned out to be free.  Directly related to how much we paid for the rug I would guess.

Erin also found two pieces of framed art to hang on our wall by the street as were leaving and noticed some couch cushions there too.  We snuck back under cover of darkness to get those.  Probably eight cushions in all that we don't really know what to do with yet.  They have cleaned up nicely though.

Across the busy street (Hwy 23), which we liken to Aurora only quieter and less seedy, we found a greenhouse/nursery where we bought some plants.  Five plants in all and the owner there threw in a few floating water plants which we put in our new bowl.  Someday we will move them to their permanent home when we find a more appropriate one.

We are slowly getting our new home into shape.  It's a process to get things the way you like it, but everything we do outside of our apartment is a learning opportunity and the slope is steep.  Where are we on that learning curve?  I'm sure it's somewhere near the origin still.

Have we hung the art?  No.  We are still trying to figure out how to do that.