The landlord provides us a 2-door refrigerator with the top freezer compartment. We somehow managed to “squeeze” a chest freezer and an upright freezer into our tiny apartment. The chest freezer was from a deal at our grocery store, yes, we got it almost free with coupons!

The outside and inside of the refrigerator.

The refrigerator is usually more packed than this, I am trying to “empty” it a bit before leaving for Malaysia in February. They are more yogurts in a plastic tub that I left them in what people here called the “Polish refrigerator” – the outside freezing cold weather.

The outside and inside of the chest freezer.

We use the chest freezer for meat. They are currently fill to the rim. The hams and turkeys that are free with coupons before Christmas are taking too much space! I have the meat separated by paper bags, one bag for pork, one bag for seafood, one bag for chicken, one bag for turkey and one bag for beef. I still have a few 2lb bags of shrimps and 30-40 bags of Franks I got in March/April 2009 inside there. The meat can last a long time in the deep freezer especially when they are vacuumed sealed.

Really glad I burned some Catalina coupons to get this vacuum sealer. It makes stockpiling perishable food and meal planning in advance much easier. With the ability to pick up fresh, seasonal fruits, vegetables when the stores are running deals or they are abundant of wine tags to get them for FREE. The vacuum-sealing allows me to use these foods when I choose, rather than rushing to use them up or waiting too long only to find they have gone bad!

The outside and inside of the upright freezer.

The upright freezer is currently filled with frozen vegetables, fruits, ice cream, breakfast food (waffles, strudels, breads) milk and pizza. The content varies from month to month as the deals differ. A couple of months ago, when milk was free with coupons, we have lots of of milk in the freezer, and didn’t have to buy milk for the last six months. Everything in this freezer is either FREE or they paid me to take home. What you see is a tip of the iceberg of what I actually bought at the store. When they paid me to bring home ice cream during a promotion in the summer, I bought more than 180 tubs of ice cream but only brought home about 20 tubs, gave/donated most of them away. The ice cream craze got me $200+ in coupons to buy other groceries/necessities.

Another view of the apartment building from the mail boxes.

Each apartment gets a mail box. Most houses here are not fenced, but our neighbor had “privacy” fence (see behind the mail boxes)

The front porch, entrance to the apartment building.

Our doorway, and steps leading to our upstairs neighbors. Our apartment is actually a few steps below the ground (Which is cooler in the summer)

The laundry room. It’s the room behind the stairs in the picture, which is in between two apartments.

There is no washer/dryer hook up inside the apartment, so we have to store away our own washer and dryer in the garage temporarily. This coin operated washer and dryer are provided by the landlord. We share with the neighbor on the ground floor, the other two neighbors upstairs have the similar setup.

Another room next to the laundry room. Look nice and neat outside.

That’s how it looks inside, quite a mess! The landlord provides and maintains the water softener.

The Kitchen.

Kitchen cabinets are boons for disorganized messy people, all the “stuffs” are tucked away in the cabinets, what you don’t see.

The hallway. Master bedroom and bathroom on the right, second bedroom, linen closet and storage closets on the left.

The bathroom.

Laundry supplies stash under the bathroom sink.

Paper products stash in the storage closets.

The walk-in closet inside the master bedroom.

Did I tell you I love this closets that keep the mess concealed behind the closed doors?

More pictures are coming………..

]]> http://www.smalltownsonata.com/virtual-tour-of-our-apartment/feed/ 1 http://www.smalltownsonata.com/we-bought-a-2002-kia-sedona-mini-van/ http://www.smalltownsonata.com/we-bought-a-2002-kia-sedona-mini-van/#comments Mon, 20 Jul 2009 16:42:37 +0000 LFS http://smalltownsonata.com/?p=380

We found this mini van on craiglist.com, it’s a site just like Ebay, but it’s FREE to list items for sale and to search the site. The seller lives at Oak Park near Chicago about 50 miles from where we live. We drove down there to view last Wed and were happy with what we saw. So, we made arragnement tor  the mechanic to do an inspection to make sure there is no evident problem with the car. After T signed the papers and paid the seller with a cashier check. I drove the Toyota Camry and T drove this baby home!

Since it’s a bigger car that runs at 18 MPG (miles per gallon) or 7-8 km per liter, its oil consumption is not that fantastic. We know Kia is not known for good mileage with gas. But, we aren’t willing to pay double or triple for a Honda, Nissan or Toyota of similar age! Gasoline is at about $2.50 per gallon right now,  we plan to use it mainly for hauling goods to flea markets and for me to run around town. We will still be using the Toyota Camry as our main car for commuting and going out of town.

Used cars are rather inexpensive here in America, we paid $3K+ for this 7 years old mini van with 80k mileage. The previous owner is a woman who lives across the street from where she works and her children’ school. It’s their second family car. She is selling this to get a smaller car with better gas mileage as her children are grown up and she no longer needs a mini van to drive them to school.

They are many people in the opposite situation i.e. moved into a place that has gas hook up and try to get rid of the electric dryer. So, we have been looking at craiglist.com for a reliable ,less than two years old used electric dryer for a couple weeks. We did find some very good deals. But T was concerned about hauling it home and bring it down to the basement, and it’s not worth hurting our backs doing that.

We finally decided to get a new one from the store today, so we don’t have to worry about delivery and installation! We went to Sears to check out the GE dryer that we saw online. It was priced at about $750 on sears.com.(not including all the taxes and delivery charges, which will be about $100+)

But then we saw a LG dryer that in the same price range, has the same functions and a larger capacity, but was on clearance due to a scratch on the top of the dryer. We don’t mind the scratch as it ’s hardly visible and saving of $200 is a substantial amount of money for us who are just starting out.

So, we decided to buy the LG dryer instead. They are going to deliver the dryer on Tuesday morning and I am looking forward to clear the laundry piles.:-)

T’s parents wanted to buy the dryer as a gift for us. Didn’t want them to spoil T or denied them a chance to help us out, so the compromise was: we paid 2/3 and they paid 1/3!