Guus Bosman

Last week the book case from Ikea arrived.

It's the same as the one we already have in the study room, but we needed more storage space.

Sunday evening I installed it. The extra shelves are very useful, and the room looks much more organized now.

When I was in the Netherlands a couple of weeks ago I bought a reproduction of an old map of Haarlem.

In the Haarlem History Museum I found the Kaart van Nautz. The map by Mr. Nautz dates from 1829 and shows the city as it was in 1822.

We had the poster dry mounted by a shop in Durham's Main Street and the result is great. The map is free of wrinkles and very easy to place on the wall.

The pictures of our apartment that I placed on Wednesday morning are some 3 months old.

Of course our house looks much different now we have moved in, so here are more recent pictures of our apartment.

In the future we want to get paintings or pictures to decorate the walls, and soon we'll get some plants and new lamps as well.

The weather is amazing today. Yesterday the sky was still cloudy after Ernesto (Petra has a good picture) and it was unusually cold but today is a wonderful day.

I don't spend much time outside during the week, so it's nice to work on my website on the balcony in the sun. It's a long weekend: Monday is Labor day.

It's almost 3 months ago that we went looking for a home in Durham.

We did most of our research online, and after many hours of internet browsing we selected a number of apartments that we wanted to see. Our main choice was the Belmont apartments: close to Duke, nice apartments and good amenities.

We took a very early flight on Saturday, and although our first flight was cancelled we arrived on Raleigh/Durham's airport around 9.30 am. We took a taxi to Durham, and we were impressed by the green next to the highway -- a lot more nature than we were used to.

We spent many hours at the Belmont apartments. The lady gave us a lot of keys for many apartments, and we saw them all. We quickly decided that we wanted something on the 3rd floor, and because the floor plan of most apartments was the same, we mainly choose on location and views. We took a lot of pictures to help us choose.

Ultimately, we found a place we liked and signed the lease that day. We stayed in a hotel in Cary for one evening, and Sunday morning we travelled back to D.C.

We wanted the movers to deliver our belongings on a weekend. I didn't want to take time off in my first week at work, and a delivery on Saturday or Sunday would be the easiest.

We spoke with quite a few moving companies, but most could not garantuee delivery on the weekend. However, a sales person at Nationwide Relocation Services said this would not be a problem. We spend a lot of time on the phone to make sure they could garantuee it, and they confirmed: "not a problem, it will be either Saturday or Sunday".

A long story short: when the movers came on Friday to pick up our things they told us that it would be impossible to deliver the next day or Sunday, and they wondered why the sales department had told us otherwise? When we called Nationwide, they said that the delivery would probably be Wednesday or Thursday.

On Monday I received a phone call around 1.00 pm from an unknown number: "hi -- we're your movers, and we're on the highway on our way from Virginia now". I asked them to give me a call 30 minutes before they arrived in Durham, so I could leave work and meet them. They didn't, so a few hours later they called me and asked me where I was: the truck had arrived and they wanted to unload it. Luckily, the apartment manager let them in, and I had to leave early, at 4 pm on my first working day.

When I came home there was a huge truck parked in the street at our apartment. The movers, a sub contractor to Nation Wide unloaded the truck in a few hours and brought everything up the stairs. They were on their way to Georgia with the rest of the load.

There was some significant inconvenience when the movers wanted to have the remaining balance paid in cash -- no checks or credit cards. This would be hard because all banks were already closed. I c called Nation Wide if they couldn't help me by performing a credit card transaction instead but they said there was nothing they could do. A couple of phone calls later I managed to get the money, and I decided never to do business with Nationwide Relocation Services ever again.

The actual move itself was executed well. We did have a little bit of damage, and 1 broken lamp, but over-all our stuff was in good shape and nothing was missing. I'm glad I didn't have to carry everything up the stairs to our new house.

On Friday July 21st the moving company came to pick up our furniture and belongings.

There were 3 guys and a large truck, and it took about 4 hours to move everything. They wrapped all the furniture in blankets and bubble wrap.

The last time we moved, from DC to Arlington, we hardly had any furniture and just a couple of suitcases and boxes, so it was much easier. After two years living in Arlington, we have collected a lot of stuff so it took a couple of hours to load everything in the truck.

We started packing for our move to Durham well on time, and did most of the small items over the weekend.

The larger items, and the things we still needed we left for the evenings.

Except for Wednesday we packed every evening till midnight. It took a lot of time to pack everything but we finished on time. Friday morning the house was full of boxes and furniture parts, ready for the movers to arrive on Friday afternoon.

This weekend we packed most of our belongings in preparation of our move to Durham, North Carolina.

It's a lot of work to pack everything, but it's fun to get ready for our move. We have packed the content of all cupboards, and the small items and papers that take a lot of time.

Tonight we're packing the remaining kitchen items and start dissembling the furniture.

Stitching together pictures is a great tool to use when you want to show views or items that are too wide for a regular camera shot.

I took my tripod and shoot the view from our balcony. The result: the view from our balcony (Quicktime, 3.9 MB).

Last week I created a 360 degree picture of our apartment. This time I held my camera on its side, to create a wider image.

The livingroom of my parent's house in Middenmeer is being renovated.

Ettie and Jaap are taking out the wood on one of the walls, to replace it with a new, white wall.

More pictures on Jaap's blog.