As I'm sitting slightly sleep-deprived, I'm more comfortable than I've been in weeks. Months. There's a materialistic explanation behind this feeling.

About one week ago, X and I started wrapping up our apartment, Dexter style, using plastic and tape. We did this top to bottom, and on Saturday, X's little brother Marcus came by and helped us paint every wall in the entire apartment.

To be short, superfluous and underestimating: that was a lot of work.

We paused only to go watch "There Will Be Blood" ““ that underwhelmed me ““ and then continued to make the apartment shine.

Everything was painted using a subdued, broken white colour and we used 20 litres of that stuff. We even painted the skirting-boards. The bedroom used up the most colour, I'm sure, as it was previously painted in a hideous baby-blue way. Horrid! I mostly hate the colour blue, but baby-blue makes me physically cringe. After a few layers and a lot of painting by hand, we were done.

The physical transformation was celebrated by stripping the apartment of all the plastic and tape ““ of which some, it must be said, still is in-place ““ which turned everything upside down. Radiance. The living-room does no longer look as if raging alcoholics with knives have run berzerk and finished off their rampage by meticulously pissing on our walls. The bedroom doesn't induce nightmares. The kitchen isn't ripped apart by millions of tiny little holes, created by the former tenants who obviously were a) obsessed with punching tiny, tiny holes into each wall, b) in love with tiny, tiny nails and c) mad.

Yesterday X and I were to start putting stuff back into place and ended up with me calling my dad, as I were unsure of how to start drilling into concrete. Of course, being my dad, he turned up at our doorstep. Three hours later, we had put five shelves (of which four are new), three new curtain-holders and two new guitar-holders with individual new curtains up.

I'm spent, in a good way. I'm ready to plop down and just enjoy life and this place. Of course, there are new things to come, e.g. golden tile-decors for the bathroom...oy vey! I'll keep you posted.