Our new Home!

When we moved out here to Boston we packed everything in boxes and labeled them all with either an N for now or L for later.  We only ever fully unpacked the N boxes because we knew that we would be moving again relatively soon to somewhere we could stay permanently for the duration of my degree, which is probably another 5 years-ish. Since then, we had to use the L boxes much more then anticipated, so I got awfully sick of digging through them, but now that's over!

We were really lucky when we moved out here to find our apartment through an awesome couple, members of the church, where we could stay as long as we needed to figure out the neighborhoods, prices, etc. in Boston and have some time while living out here to explore and choose where we wanted to plant ourselves. Finally in March we decided on a place and we were able to move the first week of this month!
As always, moving was super stressful and horrible, but it feels great now that its over.  Our new place had cream walls throughout and we wanted to paint it before we had all of our crap inside to get in the way. Our goal was rather ambitious, paint all 5 rooms that we wanted to change the color in over the course of 4 nights, after work, and during my finals.  Obviously, that didn't happen, we only finished 3 of them before our moving day. All that painting also meant we had no time to pack boxes.  So, at midnight the night before moving, we began packing.  Luckily, those L boxes were mostly done, but it was still an overnight adventure to pack it all up.  Then the next morning we picked up our Uhaul truck (an hour later and 20 minutes further away than we reserved one for, thanks Uhaul!) and dropped by a craigslist seller's house to pick up our sweet new dining room table, chairs, and china hutch, then we went to our apartment and packed it all up.  Since we have amazing friends, we had lots of help willing to travel up and down 3 flights of stairs to move it all. We WAY underestimated how long it would take us (and that all our stuff would fit into one 17' truck) but finally we got it all to our new place- even our couches....
We bought our couches back in Utah, where doors and stairways are normal sized, not anticipating that everything in Boston that was built 100 years ago would be too small to fit them, so for the past 8 months we stored them in our landlord's basement because they wouldn't fit through the stairway, and we were just hoping they would fit into our new home.  Well, after a few minutes where I thought that it was going to be a really strange looking wall because it wouldn't budge in or out of the doorway, and after some seriously impressive maneuvering, we did it! We decided that when we move out, that the couch will stay as a "selling point" because there's no way it's coming back out again in one piece.
We just barely finished all the painting and were able to put all the furniture in it's designated place, so now it finally feels like home, and I can supply the before/after pics! We really love it and are excited to make this place our home!
A little bit about the new neighborhood- it is in Dorchester, a neighborhood within Boston. Dorchester gets a bad rap sometimes because within it are some pretty sketchy areas, but it is a pretty big place, so where we live is safe and friendly. It is a 6 minute walk from the subway, so it's easy to get places on public transit, and the specific area is called St. Marks because back in the day, people called neighborhoods based on the parish it was in, and St. Mark's Catholic Church is just right across the street from us. We live in a 3 unit building on the bottom floor. Our 2 upstairs neighbors are a cute young couple around our age (with an adorable black lab), and a young vietnamese family with 2 cute little girls on the top floor.  We've already found the best Mexican food we've had since we moved to Boston right down the street, so now it will be hard to explore all the other food options! Here is a link to the map so you can see where it is inside of Boston.
I've included pictures from the listing as before pictures, then ones of the finished product.  I've also included a few pics of some other stuff not included in previous posts.

Kitchen

Kitchen

Bedroom

Stenciling in the bedroom (only partially finished)
No pics of the bedroom finished yet because the light is currently out of commision :(

Bathroom

Dining Room

Guest Bedroom

Llizi's bedroom (and for all the stuff we haven't yet unpacked)
Soon this will be the guest bedroom with a full size bed,
which means we can house visitors (hint, hint ;)  )

Living Room

Living Room

That's right, our own washer/dryer (YESSSSS!!)

Back porch and yard (it is not still snowy here,
we just haven't touched the yard yet, so it's not yet picture worthy)

Outside

Nate and Me at the Boston Marathon

A cute cake I made for easter