Small Beginnings

As I may have shared before on this blog, our new house has four balconies and a large staircase lobby. So I have huge plans for gardening in all these areas.

If you remember I had bought blue pottery planters long back (see here) to start a herb garden on my kitchen window sill. But my plans flopped pretty soon after moving in.... as I realised that the sill gets plenty of light but no air!

So all I get to place here are the flowers my kids bring for me from their weekend morning walks with dad. :)

So for now the planters have moved to the kitchen balcony with small saplings to start with. No herbs yet because the intense summer heat is hardly the time to plant herbs. Even my hardy greens and succulents are having to put up a tough fight to survive.


The sparrows don't spare them either; they think it is a lunch spread for them :) and munch on my poor plants ever so often!

The only part that looks bright and cheerful as of now is the entry where we've put up a palm with pretty leaves that my hubby liked at the plant nursery.

Recap: Mar & Apr 09

To continue with the recap...

Mar09:


As the school session was to end this month and the kids' would get a week off, we decided this was the best time to make the final move.


But before that there were such long lists of things to buy for the new house.



Result: Shopping Frenzy!



I am not much of a shopaholic but this one month I shopped like crazy. That we had quite a few exhibitions on only propelled my mad consumerist soul to go all out. I visited the Dastkaar Haat which was really, really good. You can read about it here.



Then I stocked up on bedspreads, cushion covers and god-knows-what-else from a handloom exhibition at Pragati Maidan.



End Result: Excellent Retail Therapy! :)


So loaded with all the recently purchased goodies, on the 28th we landed at the new house all bag and baggage. Was it a coincidence that the radio played that old number Final Countdown by Europe as we drove towards our new home!!!



Me and hubby had a good laugh over this; this really was the final countdown, the final move.

Apr09:

This one month passed by in such a rush. Trying to adjust to the new life at a new place. Falling into the paces at a redefined tempo.


But the fact that we had moved into a relatively sububrban setting from the mad city rush somehow soothed our senses. We finally had time to stop and smell the flowers, at least over the weekends.


We had the time to go out for walks. I resumed my reading after years. This was just the wonderful life we had wanted.... touchwood! :)

Recap: Jan & Feb 09

Here's a recap of the past few months while I was away from this blog.

Jan09:

The beginning of the year saw us take the first concrete step towards turning the new house into a home. We moved our existing furniture on the 19th and ordered for some new furniture on the 25th.

Pictures of the sample furniture in the store display.

Feb09:

The smallest month of the year turned out to be big for us! We decided to spend the Valentine weekend in the new house, amidst all the chaos of unsettled furniture and a half-arranged kitchen. But the effort was well worth it. We got a first-hand taste of how life in the new place would be when we move, and realised that two things were essential to stay in this neighbourhood - a phone and a car.


My daughter catches up on some food in the midst of royal chaos.

So we promptly brought home our new car on the 19th and that sure brought a lot of smiles on the kids' faces. :)


As I went out for a ride in the new car on the 20th, the postman handed me a parcel from the US. Guess what? My pansy drawing that I have written about here had finally arrived! Didn't I tell you Feb was a big month...


We also shopped around for curtains and cushions for the living room and got some fab deals since the sales were on. Some of our new furniture was delivered towards the end of the month but that turned out to be a mixed bag. While the sofas seemed fine, the beds were not quite what I wanted.

And thereby hangs another tale that I'll cover in detail in a future post on this blog.

Back On Track

I am pleased to announce that this blog is back on track after remaining in hibernation for over five months. These last few months have entailed a lot of hard work, and I am glad that I can now reach out to you all from the comfort of our new home.

As the process of turning the house into a real home has begun, I hope to share with you snippets and nuggets from this fantastic journey.

My next post will touch upon the happenings of the last five months, and we shall move forward from there to the here and now.

See you soon on this onward journey!

Happy New Year...

Here's wishing all my readers a happy, peaceful, and safe 2009!

Happy New Year should also spell "Happy New Home" for me and my family. So I will be away from my blogs for the next few months as I will be moving houses.

Hope to be back with you all, dear readers and visitors, in the middle of 2009 when I share fresh snippets from my experiences of turning the new house into a real home.

Leaving you with a make-believe image of our living room that I created using the very interesting Arrange A Room tool on Better Homes and Gardens.

Painting Our Grills

We have had some harrowing times with getting odd jobs done around the new house. For one, due to the high demand for skilled masons, carpenters and painters in this area (due to lots of new construction projects), the workers charge an exorbitant sum. Imagine paying 150 rupees to get a 70 rupees worth door latch fixed!

Secondly, the quality is never guaranteed. In fact, we realized that despite paying a princely sum, we were very often at the mercy of completely unskilled labour. Like our fabricator who used inferior quality primer on our grill work, causing parts of it to catch some rust.

That is when the hubby and I decided to do the paint job for the new grills ourselves.

And so we’ve been hard at work the past two weekends trying to figure out how best to tackle it all. We bought some metal paint, a thinning agent, a couple of brushes and got down to it. Though our pace is rather slow, at least we know that the quality won’t get compromised. We just completed the grills on one balcony – they don’t look too bad, what say?

Will keep you posted on how and when the remaining ones get done.

Any tips from anyone on how best to finish our grill painting?

P.S: I must admit that I found the painting exercise immensely therapeutic. And got to spend some quality time with the hubby in the process. Talk of killing two birds with one stone!

September Update

I haven’t posted anything here since the griha-pravesh for various reasons:

• We (me and the hubby, that is) have been super-busy and unable to devote any time to the new house. So the poor house lies abandoned like an orphan child these days (and it breaks my heart to write this)…. However, there is hope yet. With a status change in my career (you can read about that here) I am hoping I will be able to focus more on the new house.
• I haven’t received a single comment on the previous post, and that really depressed me. My feed tells me that a lot of you come strolling by, but no one stops to say ‘Hello’ and that is a little disheartening. After all, I write to be read, and unless you tell me how you find the content, how can I improve on it? So I’m hoping my pleadings will have an impact, and I’ll see more comments appearing on this blog.

Ok, after that bit of shameless self-plug, here comes a bit of good news. Right after the griha-pravesh, I won a Gallery Days Giveaway contest from the wonderfully talented Debbie. As a result the new house is getting a hand-made gift all the way from New York!!

Am I excited? Suffice to say that I can’t wait for the gift to reach me. :)) After all, who doesn’t LOVE gifts, especially such special ones.