Impending move...

Knock on wood, we close on Friday (so close!), and I’ve been making lists like a madwoman for the last week. We get the keys on the 12th, and our lease doesn’t end until the 31st, so we have three weekends plus the intervening weekdays to make the move.

We’ve rented a van for the final Saturday in October to move over all of the big furniture (and we have some awesome friends who actually volunteered to help – bless them. I’m so excited not to have to wrangle the couches and mattresses.). We’ll do the fishtank the next day, by ourselves. (The details on that deserve their own post).

In the meantime, we’ll clean, paint (the family room, and one bedroom), and start moving over all of the bits and sundry. The new house is actually right on both of our drives to work, so it won’t be too hard to bring a few box-fulls over each day until everything’s in place. (Even better, it means we can just keep reusing the boxes and packing supplies! AND, there’s real incentive to fully unpack each day, so that when we finally start sleeping in our new home at the end of the month, everything will be unpacked into its spot instead of sitting in a wall of boxes.)
I’ve been sort of grieving for our apartment for the last few weeks, in my typical poorly-transitioning way. (We’ve lived here for more than three years – the longest-lived home since high school. Kevin proposed here. I’ll miss the daily view of the Olympic Mountains and the lake. It held the first several phases of the fishtank. Larry came over for movies and sports, or just to hang out. The way that you can see what the weather will be in three hours by looking at the sky to the east. The first seven months that we lived here, when I was willfully unemployed and spent most of my days reading and knitting. Our running routes. Our fireworks spot. I keep thinking of things that I’m sad to leave.)

That’s not to say that I’m not excited about the new house. I’m totally won over – we both have been since we first saw it. We can’t wait for the projects, we can’t wait for family and friends to visit. And, last week, it occurred to me that the move could be such a last hurrah for our apartment. All of the reasons we’ve grown past it (kayaks and bikes in the living room, skis and camping gear and power tools and luggage crowding the closets, wonderful wedding gifts that have nowhere to live, wood from furnishing projects that we didn’t have the space to finish) can move to the new house. (Yay for garages!) And so as we settle our new place, our old place will just get better. It’s a relief to finally have a positive way of viewing the move.

In the meantime, I’ve been going through cupboards and cabinets and closets to find the things that we no longer need. I don’t want to move anything that we don’t have to!! For example, the almost-empty shampoos and expired sunscreens from Boston and before would have taken up a full box.