Home Sweet Home

Well it has been far too long since we last wrote, sorry about that!  As most of you know, we spent the first part of the summer visiting family, making moving plans, and just enjoying the land of the free!  It has been really good to be home.  Ben and I are now settled into our new place and absolutely loving it.  It would be hard not to love it though after three years in university accommodation!  Nonetheless, I thought it would be fun to show you our new place and mention some of my favorite details.

It was pretty fun moving into a place and getting to unpack all of our belongings for the first time in three years.  It felt like we were getting married all over again!  I have to say though, one of the things that God really changed in me while we were in Cambridge was my attachment to “stuff.”  I love stuff.  I love to decorate and entertain, and keep every special memento which means that it is very easy to accumulate.  There were times when Cambridge was really hard because we had so little, and yet the simplicity of life there changed me.  I loved having space.  I loved having empty drawers and cabinets that weren’t packed to the brim.  So as we moved into our new place, there were moments when I felt overwhelmed by the amount of stuff we had.

I counted eight spatulas.  Eight.  I have certainly never cooked with an octopus so it just seemed a tad excessive.  There was a point when I was unpacking our kitchen that I became overwhelmed as I was running out drawers and cabinets (granted, we don’t have many at all), and I just kept thinking, “what am I going to do with all this?”  I had never even used some of it.  So after we had opened every box, I started really looking at things and making “keep” and “give away” piles.  I had so looked forward to moving home, but I did not look forward to feeling like we were already bursting at the seams.  So we took about four boxes of stuff to goodwill and now I feel like we can breathe.  We have space.  Not every shelf is taken and not every drawer is filled.  It feels good.

So here is just a quick glance into our new home…

Entry way…I love the birds 🙂

I have my own couch again!!!!

My new dining room table…love, love, love!

Hallway to the bathroom and bedroom…love all the colors in the house!

Very small bedroom but it works!

Hands down my favorite thing is having a dishwasher again!

Ben’s little garden

We needed extra storage and Ben said he liked these wire racks…I was not a fan at first…now it is one of my favorite areas! Smart man that one!

Last Minute Dinner Plans

Last night we had dinner at our friends Candice and Collin’s house.  It was a simple night, but I loved it nonetheless.  On Friday a couple of us realized that we didn’t have plans for Saturday night, so we decided to hang out and do nothing together.  That is just the kind of thing that I love.  We didn’t have to get dressed up or cook anything fancy, it was just a night sitting around a table enjoying salad, chicken skewers, sweet tea, and good conversation.  These nights are what I will miss most once we go back to the states.

It isn’t that we won’t have simple dinners with friends, but there is a sense of unity here that is very unique.  We are all here because one person in each couple is studying for a PhD.  A good chunk of us are finishing up in the next 3-12 months and we are all starting to think about the next phase…going home.  We talk a lot about what we love here in Cambridge and England in general.  We love the fact that we don’t have Texas heat in the summertime, we love the community, and we all love online grocery shopping!  Most of us have been here for several years and we talk about how difficult it will be to leave our tight-knit group of friends.  We are all excited for the next stage of our lives (when our husbands actually get real jobs!), but we don’t want to rush out of this stage of life either.  We want to enjoy this time for all its worth.

Mostly the night involved laughing about the fact that there are very few job prospects and we may very well have to beg our families for jobs!  We will all be going home to different situations, some of us boxed up all our belongings and shoved them in our parents basements, others sold everything they had, and others brought all they owned with them.  We will go home and have to buy cars, renew driving licences, buy bottle openers and the everyday necessities.  We will be starting from scratch in a lot of ways, but it is exciting.

We don’t know what the future holds, but we will all look back fondly on these years.  The friendships we have made here will last a lifetime.  We have all shared something very special and unique here in Cambridge.  We are all so much a part of each others lives that it will be extremely sad when we all go our separate ways.  I don’t want to think about that yet though.  So today I am going to be thankful for last-minute dinner plans, laughter over a great meal, sharing clothes, and just sharing life.

Home Sweet Home

Well it is time for us to share our big news with all of you.  Yep, you guessed it, we moved into a new apartment!!  I cannot begin to express the change that has occurred in our lives since moving into this flat.  We are warm.  We have hot water (well, most of the time).  We can have more than two people in our apartment at one time without it being a fire hazard.  We no longer have to weather proof our windows with sheets of plastic in order to keep the wind out.  And after 13 months, we were actually able to unpack all our suitcases!

Peterhouse knew of our desire to leave our old flat, so we were quite thrilled when they contacted us in late September and told us that they had a flat for us to look at.  It is literally a stone’s throw away from our old flat so we are still in a great central location.  We came for a viewing and I was so excited.  We walked through the door and I was instantly sold.  The living room was at least double the size of our old one and it has this amazing wall with built-in shelves.  The ironic thing is that we have always wanted this kind of built-in bookcase, but we have none of our books with us!  So, for now it is an empty bookcase.  Empty, but beautiful.

The living room is my favorite room because it has the bookcase, an old fireplace (that doesn’t work, but is still pretty nonetheless), high ceilings with large windows.  Large windows covered with the same motel 6 curtains, but I think this pattern is significantly nicer.  Or maybe I am just becoming blind to crazy patterned curtains.  The highlight of the living room…we have a real couch again!!  The kind that you can actually sit cross-legged on, or you could even lay down.  Amazing.  Beyond the living room we have a nice size kitchen though it is a bit on the blue side.  Even the cabinets are blue.  Very au-naturel.

From there we have a little mud room with a washer and dryer.  That’s right, no more coins or hefting laundry out into the cold and down to the grad laundry room.  They are two very strange machines though.  The first time I did our laundry I took it out and it was soaking wet.  Then I realized (or rather, Ben did) that there was a separate spin cycle.  Never seen that before.  Then the dryer took about three cycles before our clothes were actually dry.  That was when we found this huge cylinder of water that you have to take out to empty.  Once we figured that out, it worked like a gem.  A gem that was built in 1960 perhaps, but a gem nonetheless!

Our bedroom isn’t anything too exciting, but it is warm and a bit bigger than our old one.  The bathroom is lovely though.  It has an actual bath so now I don’t have to be a contortionist just to shave my legs.  It is painted bright red, but as we are Sooner fans, we are pretty happy with that.  All in all, the new place is a huge blessing.  It feels so much more like a home, and even though it is really old, we love that it has character.   It doesn’t feel like our dorm at OU.  It feels like me and Ben’s Cambridge flat.  It feels like home.

My pale-blue-smurf kitchen. My grandma would love it.

Isn’t that full length mirror amazing? Frightening at times as well.

Boomer Sooner!!!

Laundry Room…oh baby!

Ah, the beautiful bookcase.

Our first real fireplace. If only I could light a fire!

Look at the space…I feel like spinning with my arms outstretched just looking at this photo!

As they say on Cribs…this is where the magic happens.

Lesson #2 from our first year – A Simple Life is Okay

When we came to Cambridge a year ago, the two of us each had two suitcases packed with as much as we could bring for our new home.  That’s it.  We didn’t ship any stuff over.  95% of what we owned in the US was either sold, given away, or packed into boxes and placed in our parents’ basements.  We knew that we would be moving into a furnished apartment, so we figured that we’d get to the UK and then figure out what we needed to buy once we saw what the apartment included.

Well, when we arrived, we discovered that ‘furnished’ is a term that can be used rather loosely.  The kitchen came with 3 pots, 1 pan, a few plates and cups and bowls, some basic silver wear, a few basic utensils, a few knives, a toaster and microwave, a dorm-room refrigerator, and, strangely enough, a sandwich press.  We weren’t expecting a kitchen-aide mixer, but it would have been nice to have had a mixing bowl.  We knew that our dishes wouldn’t be from Pottery Barn, but we thought we’d at least have enough dishes to invite people over for dinner.  In California, we had what to us was a dream kitchen – even if we rarely used most of the gadgets and utensils that we had.  This new kitchen was a big adjustment.  Things were a lot simpler.

Our kitchen wasn’t the only area where our lives were simplified.  In the states we had two cars.  Here we have one bike.  I used to drive 30 minutes to school.  Now I just walk across the street.

The simplicity of life here has been an adjustment.  Some of the changes have been positive.  Almost all of our friends live within walking distance, which makes it very easy to meet up with people spontaneously.  Also, life can be less stressful when your circumstances limit your options and dictate your choices for you.  Because of the relative prosperity that we had in the US, we were constantly faced with a seemingly limitless array of choices in every area of life – what we would buy at the grocery store and where we would eat out, how we would structure our schedules, what we would do with our free time.

We still get to make a lot of choices for ourselves here, but our options are significantly narrowed.  On a date night, instead of choosing between 30 different restaurants, 3 theatres, and 5 ice-cream shops, our choice for dinner typically looks something like this:  Dinner – McDonald’s, Subway, or Pizza Express?  Entertainment – Play cards or watch a DVD?  Dessert – Nutella toast or a bowl of cereal?  In some ways, we miss the allure of endless possibility, and sometimes none of the options seems too appealing.  It was nice to be able to choose between watching a movie, going to the batting cages, playing miniature golf, taking a walk, going to the arcade, going to Disney Land, going to the driving range, or any one of the other forms of entertainment that we had in California.  At the same time, having fewer options has made life less stressful.

After one year in this simplified life, we can’t deny that there’s a lot about our lifestyle in the US that we miss.  Unpacking all of our nice stuff when we move back home will feel like the best Christmas ever.  Nevertheless, this has been a really good, healthy experience for us.  We’ve been faced with our own materialism, and there have been positive lessons we’ve taken from this that will effect how we make decisions about raising children, spending money, setting up our own schedules, and finding balance in life.  A simplified life can be a very good thing.