LBC and the Cat Welcoming Committee

Slowly but surely we’re making minor improvements to our living arrangements.  It’s something of an uphill battle and I’ve been trying to clean and organize as I go, with short dedicated periods of cleaning up every day.  Parts of the house seem to have not been used in months or years.  That was the case with the room we cleaned up during our first visit.

I haven’t gotten back to organizing the bookshelves on the second floor.  There are still books all over the place as well as files and random bits of paper that will probably wind up as tinder for the fire I plan on making to burn quite a bit of this junk.  I really want to get back to that, but other things keep popping up.

The day after we got here, the first box we shipped from Singapore arrived.

 

After the welcoming committee finished using the outside of the box as a scratching board, we started to unpack it and bring everything upstairs.

It was a pretty happy occasion for all of us, since there were things in it we could put to immediate use, like the cats’ gym, some cables I was looking for, clothes, and the tool that you have to use to remove a SIM card from an iPhone.

We’ve been doing a lot of shopping as well.  Living here is temporary, but it’s just not going to work if there’s no furniture, which there wasn’t.  Luckily, furniture is cheap in the Philippines, if you know where to go and shop around for good deals.  The problem we’re facing now is overcrowding, and we haven’t even received the 2nd and 3rd boxes we sent from Singapore yet, so we’ve been buying plastic boxes to organize everything.  We’ll put them on top of the dresser and under the bed.  That should help us utilize the space effectively.  When we move to Manila, pretty much all of this stuff will go with us and we’ll have more room for it.  For now we’re staying in my wife’s old room, so it’s understandable that there’s not much space.

One lucky break is that I keep finding scrap metal everywhere.  I’m going to make quite a hefty sum when I sell all of it, which I can then reinvest into further renovations around the house.  I swear there are half a dozen unfinished projects in here and for every unfinished one I see, there are that many more that I’d like to start on.  I’m not willing to make that large of an investment here, but we’ll do what we can while we’re here.