The movers arrived on time and in good form three days before we were set to relinquish our newly sold house. We used the same company to move back to Sonoma County as we did to move to Mendocino County. Careful Moving and Storage gave us excellent service all around.
There was a multi-day delay between the time our furniture and boxes were loaded onto the truck and when we took possession of our new home. We were very fortunate that my uncle has the space and patience to take the hubby and me, and ALL of our animals, into his home (and yard) for five nights.
We hired a house cleaner and carpet cleaner to take care of the big stuff, but we still had to go back in the final hours before escrow closed to gather the last items, vacuum, patch holes, put give away items out on the curb, sweep out the garage and carport, and take some final pieces to long-term storage. It doesn’t sound like much (or does it?) but it felt like a huge last push. (There is the childbirth analogy creeping in again.)
I was embarrassed about the piles of boxes when we were packing up;
imagine how much worse I felt when it was all piled into the new house. I couldn’t bring myself to take a picture of that particularly chaotic scene.
Finding anything that first week was a challenge! We likened it to a sophisticated memory game. A box would be opened, an item was triumphantly pulled out and used; a mental note was made about the rest of the contents. A “do you know where x is?” would come up, and when we went searching for the appropriate box, it had been moved, or covered by another box. Oops. Where did that stuff go again?
The boxes were pretty well labeled with contents and color coded by room, and most ended up in the correct space, but often, they were all stacked, and then rearranged, and the content labels were not always showing. It took far too long to track down the can opener. At one point, I had to use the hubby’s camping can opener. Ugh.
We felt like we were staying in a very high end, but poorly stocked, AirBnB.
We found just enough pots and pans, toothpaste, toothbrushes and clothing to function for the first week. We ordered out too much. We moved boxes from one spot to another. Some furniture went outside. One new box was dubbed: “What was I thinking?” There were so many items that were packed in a hurry near the end that really should not have been.
Shifting Priorities
We had long lists of tasks, all in order of priority, to complete in the initial weeks in our new home. The first thing we planned to do, I say “we” in a supporting the hubby kind of way, was to put up special fencing around the perimeter of the backyard near the top of the fence line, to keep our cats in the yard and feral critters out. Other than the first test strip, that task has fallen way down the list.
We had planned to break down all the cardboard boxes as they were emptied and spread them out on the barren backyard to act as a cheap weed barrier. We were going to have a bunch of tanbark delivered to cover the cardboard, ensuring that weeds would not take over before we could begin landscaping the moonscape that was left for us.
That task dropped off the list altogether once we realized how uneven the ground was. It has since been “leveled” even though that was not on the original list of tasks.
And let me say that while emptying boxes feels good initially, finding a place for empty boxes is a challenge we didn’t anticipate. Even flattened, they took up a lot of precious space.
Temporary window coverings had to go up right away. Our purchase agreement required that all windows be covered with a neutral color scheme within 90 days of the close of escrow. Newly built houses, we discovered, don’t come with any unless they are purchased from the builder’s design center in advance. Let’s just say that we were out of money at that point. Paper accordion coverings from Home Depot went up in every window that could be seen from the street.
There are a number of expenses that we didn’t anticipate. That is a story for another blog post.
Settling into our new house has felt like that tile game. There is a finite amount of unused space, but we need to rearrange furniture, boxes, rugs, books, knick-knacks, pots, pans, and pictures as we figure out how to live in this lovely new home.
Visceral Musings 