A Month of Updates part one

Ah, sorry about the photos.  i don't know how to arrange them properly yet, and it's too late in the night to try anymore.  just so you know, the bottom one here is the "before" shot.  

So then, after a month of waiting, we finally have internet access, and so we begin to catch up with photos and updates.  Since we last posted, we have done a lot of work on our apartment.  This photo is (hopefully obviously) a "before" shot. Mandy made me take down the poster.  

This was after the previous tenants had done like, 12 hours of cleaning in there.  However, there had been about 8 years' worth of little piggies living in here before them, so we were not too surprised to find a pretty substantial layer of dusty, sticky grime all over EVERYTHING.  It took a long time to scrub it all clean.  I think we did a pretty decent job though.  

After all the scrubbing and purchasing of nice-but-not-too-nice furnishings, we are quite pleased with the place.  We had heard that Japanese apartments can be cramped, but ours is spacious, especially for two of us.  We have an entry hallway, off which is the front room, which is almost entirely empty and which i use for stretching in the mornings.  

Mandy has set up a table in there too for painting on.  She already has done a nice painting of some flowers she got. Also off the entry hallway is the laundry/washing room, off which is the shower/bathing room.  Everything has its own little room.  The last little room off the entry hallway is the going to the bathroom room.  It's also the secondary library.  

THEN we enter the kitchen, which is what you see in the above photo.  It is large, and includes the dining area, which sits in the light that comes in through the balcony windows/sliding door.  Off the kitchen is our bedroom, and off the dining area is the living room, which also has balcony windows and sliding door.  

Every room in this last group open up to each other, or close off by sliding doors.  It's nice to be able to open it all up or close it all up depending on how much light you want in the room, or how much fresh air, or how much heat you want to preserve.  We have no central heating, so we're learning to be smart about using our resources. 

As i said, it's late, so we're going to sleep.  We just skyped with Mandy's brother, Jamison, in Montreal, and we would welcome any skype calls from anyone!  the skype name is participaction.  Just remember the 15 or so hour time difference.  Intense!