This is my first "Case de Szerlip" blog post since we sold the house. I didn't anticipate writing nearly as many of these now that we are happily back in an apartment. However when we quickly moved into our apartment in July of 2015 we took what furniture we had and made it work.  Now nearly a year later we've renewed our lease to mid-2017 and wanted to continue making our apartment home.

By now you've probably read my post "Sometimes the Right Decisions Are the Toughest Decisions". In that I talked in depth about our struggle to decide what to do with our home. Spoiler, we sold it. When we accepted the offer for our home we had (no exaggeration) 14 days to find a place to live and move out. Crazy right? We went to look at a a couple of places but fell in love with one place in particular the Essex Skyline.

When I started blogging in 2003 I used it as a journal. A way to just jot down thoughts about my day, my life, my friends, my tennis career, and my pursuit of Jenn. It slowly morphed from that into a highlight reel of my life. A way for me to have a place to look back on the fond memories. A timeline of events so that one day in the future when I want to remember what I ate in Paris in 2008 when I got off the train I can (it was shrimp risotto from the hotel room service). It's an amazing life to write about. I've been blessed. I have an incredible, amazing wife who's my best friend. I have the best family I could ask for. I have a great job. I get to travel the world. I've been incredibly blessed. 

For the last five years I've been strictly a Keurig coffee drinker for my at home coffee consumption. It's the perfect device to wake up, throw a pod in and have a good cup of coffee. But as anyone who's had a Keurig knows they aren't the most reliable. My Keurig broke probably a half dozen times in the five years I had it and required heavy cleaning to even get it to work. In the last month or two I was having to re-clean it over and over to get even close to a half cup of coffee per pour. Not worth it. So it was time for a change. 

After deciding to stay in our new home we've begun doing the renovations we were going to do back in February. The best part of waiting has been re-prioritizing what we wanted to get done for the house. After removing those ugly built-ins from the second bedroom and the atrium we were on to the second project, the carpet.

Jenn and I love ping pong. When we lived at The Colony we would walk over to the Marriott and play ping pong near their pool. Probably not the classiest thing to do, but we enjoyed it. It always made us feel like we were on vacation. When we started looking at houses one of the "nice-to-haves" for me was an area for a ping pong table. And of course if you've been following the "Casa de Szerlip" series you know that we have a really nice size atrium at our new house.