Assembly required

Although neither of us have ever been a fan of IKEA in the past, we're now stan, I think is what the young ones say. We slept for the first nights on an air mattress bought by our amazingly helpful personal assistant company, PACO Services, before we arrived in the apartment. We went to IKEA in the first few days to look at furniture, took some pics and decided to buy things online and have them delivered.

While there, we grabbed a rolled up mattress to throw on the floor in place of the air mattress. We called an Uber XL and wrangled it in the back of a small SUV, then into the elevator.

It was a serious step up until our Temperpedic mattress arrived a few days later. I'd never had the experience of a mattress on the floor except when camping, or an air mattress when moving, so this was an adventure. Particularly figuring out how to fold myself in a way that I could actually get up from the floor. This whole thing is keeping us young and flexible in so many ways.

A week and a few days into our new life, we now have our bed, and are in the thick of assembling furniture for the place. We decided on two chairs, a leaf table, a couch, and a bookshelf/storage from IKEA.

We assembled a whole couch. I feel like we can now conquer anything.

Given the fact that we are on the sixth floor of a building with a very tiny elevator, the fact that our furniture can be put back into pieces when we leave this apartment is super appealing. Even though we'll hire movers when we eventually buy a place, I'd still hate to have them schlep a couch down six floors. Beyond that, the engineering of some of these pieces is tank-like, which is impressive given it's all in flat boxes. I will also say I'm impressed we've not messed up any assembly yet. As I type this Shayne just clocked himself pulling a piece apart, which might leave a bruise. I should have waited to say anything about our successful assembly, I think I just jinxed it.

We're still not entirely used to the time zone shift yet, but hopefully tonight will be the clencher in that game. We will (particularly me) have to come up with a way to combat the time shift when we travel back to the States for anything, it is just difficult to adjust, more so than I'd ever imagined. Along with time zones, I'm also just exhausted from the entirety of the move. I tend to sleep off stress, and by our calculations (one week of stress, one day of sleeping) it should take me about a month and a half to recover from almost exactly a year of so much change.

There was so much to bring together to make this all happen, paperwork, tons of stress and worry about 'what if it doesn't work?', lining up lists and plans and timelines. The D7 hangover is for real, takes a bit of time to unpack and reassemble one's approach to everything. We aren't just assembling our furniture but our futures. We've made some friends here, we're starting to get the hang of a few small things, and tackle the language.

One day at a time life is taking shape here, and I'm starting to see where we fit more and more each day within this new world of ours.