hello unit 422!

Posted: November 12, 2012 | Author: | Filed under: bnuna, photo album, roaming | Tags: , , , , | 4 Comments

we decided we were going to paint stripes on our new living room wall, and so we googled diy tutorials, hustled a couple of quarts of free paint (thank you, leftover paint from a project from a year ago!), and spread some old newspapers on the parquet floor. how hard could it be, right? 🙂

painting 101

stripes!

we officially declare you ‘the rustic focal wall’! :p

ta-daa!

other images from our 3-day move.

stuff against walls

i am in love with these curtains.

alvin+jona

being handy, my wonderful husband has learned since, can be really tiring.

change of address

Posted: November 1, 2012 | Author: | Filed under: alvin, bnuna, roaming | Tags: , , , | Leave a comment

in preparation for the arrival of the fetus currently residing in the general area of my tummy, alvin and i will be moving to a slightly bigger condominium unit next weekend. this will be my fifth move in six years.

up until six years ago, i’ve only remembered living in one house, the one we moved into before i turned one and where i grew up, became all teenagered and angsty, and eventually got over most of my life issues in. nobody in my immediate circle regularly changed houses and, growing up, i’ve always assumed that everyone picked a location, hunkered down and stayed there forever.

i’ve lived in four other houses since, each one a witness to a different stage in my life.

when i moved out of my childhood home and into a condo unit with a friend, it felt like a fresh start. it was a few months after arlie’s death and i desperately needed that fresh start.

i was doing something new, something rebellious, even, in this society where homes overflowed with the belongings and limbs of extended families; i was moving out! never mind that we were renting the unit from my sister for a fraction of its real rental cost, we felt like such adults being on our own.

i cried and questioned the universe a lot in that unit; it provided me the solitude i needed to freely grieve and move on and i emerged from it months after, changed but still whole.

the apartment i next moved into, still with a friend, was blue and airy and mirrored how i felt about my life at that point in time. i had just met alvin, was getting to know him, and everything felt light and bright, like i had left all the darkness and sadness behind. i lived in that apartment for two years.

then i moved in with alvin and the twins, and into the chaos of constancia, which was another fun couple of years. i’ve never lived with a boyfriend before and although there was the fear of over-exposure, moving in each other’s space made us grow closer and more accepting of the other.

early last year, i got married and moved into the condo unit where alvin and i live now. our first home. when we moved in last year we only had a handful of things with us, not even a sofa to our name. i remember it took a few days before the electricity kicked in and we spent our first night in our new space, which happened to be valentine’s, in the dark, feeling all giddy and newly married.

we’ve been really happy in our small home and have created wonderful memories of our first couple of years of marriage in it. i didn’t think we would need to move so soon, and the prospect of packing everything up and carting it all the way down the end of the hall is frankly stressing my pregnant brains out (especially since we own big, bulky, heavy adult appliances now), but it seems that every major new stage in my life obliges a change of residence.

so okay, i’ll happily exchange unit 404 with unit 422. after all, the universe hasn’t led me astray yet, and there will be new happy memories to fill the new unit with, along with baby pee and poop.

finding our way home

Posted: February 23, 2011 | Author: | Filed under: bnuna, roaming | Tags: | Leave a comment

anyone who’s ever had to move to a new place knows about the hassle that goes with it every step of the way.

from finding a new place to move to, to packing up your stuff and realizing you’ve inadvertently amassed two-roomfuls of useless things, to the logistics of actually getting those useless things (plus the actual useful ones you own, like clothes) to the new place, and finally to making a set of walls and empty space feel like home.

the most basic hassle though, is learning how to get to and from your new address. horrible as your old place was (because why would you ever leave if it wasn’t? oh yea, you got married.), chances are you actually knew more than one route and which bus or jeep to take to get there.

ever since alvin, i usually just sit and say ‘place-i-don’t-know-how-to-get-to’ and he’d either give me step by step directions to get there, or literally bring me to where it was.  this set-up has been working very well for the past four years. until now.

every wednesday, when the car had to stay off the streets, alvin and i used to take the makati loop jeep home to constancia. this jeep is easy to find; walk over to park square, climb up the winding concrete floor leading to the jeep terminals, get on the jeep and let it drop you off at the corner of constancia and jp rizal.

our new address isn’t as convenient to get to. the simplest (and frankly, the only one i know) way is to ride the train to magallanes station, get the mantrade-prc jeep and get off in front of shopwise supermarket. now if i were going home straight from work that would be fine since i would be on the train from ortigas anyway, but coming from the ayala mall cluster is a different matter altogether.

our first wednesday at makati terraces, we tried to go home from the glorietta mall. now, we *know* that there exists a jeepney line that plies the ayala-zapote route; we’ve seen it turn right along p. ocampo street a few hundred meters from shopwise which, though not ideal, was still a walkable distance to our building, but we had no idea where it originates or where the stops were.

we remembered seeing a couple of unofficial jeep terminals in front of landmark and so decided to check those out. when we got there, alvin asked one of the barkers which the line for the zapote jeep was, and we skipped off to where he waved us to.

when our jeep came, it had a ‘makati loop’ sign on its windshield, which i pointed out to alvin. he seemed unconcerned and so we got on. five minutes later, the jeep was driving through the exact route we used to take going home to constancia.

by then, it was too late to change jeeps and so we agreed to just stay on and see where it goes past where we usually got off. it drove past constancia, past zapote (yes, the same zapote we were aiming for but the other end of a fairly long street), past mcdonald’s prc, then it u-turned into pasong tamo and we began to feel hopeful; we were on pasong tamo already, after all!

then it suddenly turned right going to sta. ana and hopeful started turning to dismay.

but even then alvin wouldn’t get off, it might just be detouring and circle out to pasong tamo again, he reasoned. after a couple of minutes and with the driver showing no sign of doubling back down some parallel street, we finally shouted ‘para!’, scrambled off the jeep and ended up spending a good fifteen minutes walking the rest of the way home.

it’s wednesday again and we still have no idea where to get the elusive jeep, plus i have a morning meeting along makati avenue tomorrow which i plan to go straight to from home. i’m thinking maybe i should leave the house a couple of hours in advance in case i needed to walk all the way there.