Well, it's been a while since I've written. I have a very good reason. We've moved. And it was a sudden move, out of the blue, hit without warning.
I got a call from a friend of mine, asking if we were interested in moving into a house. A three bedroom house with a yard. I looked around our squalid two bedroom hovel of an apartment, and I couldn't help but say "yes!".
She made us a very good deal, allowing us to pay what we were paying on the apartment. But part of that deal meant having to clean up after the previous tenants in the house, which I don't have a problem with, because it's been an amusing adventure to say the least. And it meant we'd have to move quickly, without seeing the inside of the house. At least at first.
There have been so many anxieties about moving for me, that I don't really know where to start. First of all, I like to plan for things like moving. I grew up in the Air Force, and we moved every two or three years, like clockwork. I learned a lot about moving from my mother, who would be meticulous and methodical in her approach to packing and getting us from abode A to abode B. She was awesome.
Although I learned a lot from her, I never managed to grasp the organizational skills required to pull off a truly masterful move. But that was ok for me when I was younger. A college student doesn't have a lot of stuff and all can be easily crammed into a suitcase or two, adding a box or so for each year. And my early adult life outside of college was equally carefree and unassuming. Yes, I had more crap to cart around, but nothing major. Or rather nothing major that I put a lot off stock in. I could move easily and freely, with one notable event. I moved from a house in North Seattle to a small apartment in Manhattan. Times Square, to be exact. And I had to do it entirely by myself while injured. I had two arms that were non-functional. And my spouse at the time (the reason why I was moving to NYC) refused to fly home to help with the move. Needless to say, it was ugly.
But then I had several moves since then that weren't so traumatic or grueling.
It wasn't until this move, that I realized how utterly over my head I've become in terms of the sheer amount of crap I own. Granted, not all the stuff is mine. I have four kids, two cats, and a loving husband, all who have stuff of their own. I had also amassed a sizable collection of boxes of crap from my past that I had, up to now, refused to deal with, sitting in a storage garage that also had to be moved.
And I had to do it alone.
Well, to be fair, not entirely alone. My husband did help out as much as he was able. He has an injured shoulder that prevents him from lifting anything heavy, and he has a medical condition that leaves him drained and unable to do much more than his basic, day-to-day stuff, while also holding down a job. There was no way I was going to ask him to do more than he could physically do on this move. He was already expending his energy going to work and making sure that we had money to pay bills and make ends meet.
And I had the kids, who, although young, were able to occasionally help me, when they weren't getting underfoot, or undoing the work I had just finished completing. But their hearts were in the right place.
The cats, obeying the order of things. They neither got in the way, nor did they help out.
On top of that, I had never seen the interior of the new house. This is something that I never do. I HAVE to see what a place looks like before I can move into it. I have to be able to see myself in the space, to visualize what it would be like living there, before I can totally get behind the move. Here, I had no way of seeing the inside without being rude and going up to the front window and peeking in while the previous tenants still lived here.
When the previous tenant DID finally move out (15 days AFTER they were initially to move out), my husband did come by and peek in the window and look in the backyard. His report was this, "I think we're going to lose some space moving in. The rooms look small. But the backyard is nice."
This did nothing to encourage me, as I was frantically packing in what could only be described as a random pattern throughout the apartment. I tried to pack up the stuff I thought we wouldn't need first, just to get it out of the way. And then as we'd get closer to moving stuff to the new place, I'd start to pack up the more essential items. To me, it seemed very haphazard and disorganized, but I tried to stay true to "the plan".
Finally, my friend called me and asked if I wanted to come see the house. She and her husband were legally able to enter the house and start clearing things out. I leaped at the chance and I loaded the kids in the car and we drove the two blocks over to see where we were going to live. At first, I was all giddy with excitement. But that was swiftly snuffed out when I walked in the front door.
The place was a shambles. Rubble and debris littered the floor. There was a hideous garland of plastic leaves running the circumference of the living room ceiling. There were huge burn marks in the carpet (not even near the fireplace) and char marks on the walls. There was the horrid smell of rotten food permeating the entire house. Apparently the power had been turned off and the food in the refrigerator had long rotted. My friend was busy unloading the fetid contents into a large garbage can when we arrived. Later, the kids confided in me that they were worried that the new house would always have that smell, and I had to do a LOT of convincing that the smell would be gone by the time we moved in. I don't think they entirely believed me, but they put on a brave face.
The rest of the house was no better than the living room. Although one of the bedrooms had a decent paint-job. Or rather, the interior decorating in that room hadn't gone horribly awry and it was almost pleasant. The master bedroom was just aweful. The silhouettes of playboy bunny heads adorned the room, and there was far more burn damage than in the living room (although nothing rivaled the huge burn hole in the living room carpet.) One of the mirrored closet doors was adorned with a sticker of a scantily-clad woman with large breasts starting to take off her underwear. Charming. Not that I have anything against that, mind you. It was just in context of the larger picture of the room that made my mind reel. Oh, and I forgot to mention the bolt hole that was cut into the floor of the master bedroom. The crowning turd of destruction, in my opinion.
There were other bits of destruction, too. Holes cut out in the dry wall. A broken window. Filth and garbage everywhere. Lots of discarded oxygen tanks. And interesting, angry murals painted in the garage depicting demons and naked women, proclaiming to be the "ruin of man". The kids refer to the garage art as the "bad art" and my eldest son doesn't even like going into the garage because of it. Needless to say, it will get painted over.
My heart was pretty low that day when we left the house. It was not a great first impression. I wondered if we had made a mistake in taking this opportunity. Was moving out of the apartment and the bad neighborhood we lived in, worth moving into what appeared to be a cesspit of despair? I tried to console myself with the thought that it was a good opportunity and that we wouldn't be able to move into a house otherwise, but it was cold comfort against the images running through my head.
I went back the next day, with my camera. My husband wasn't there on that first trip and I thought pictures would better describe what we were about to move into. In the light of day, the house had a mellower feel. It seemed to almost welcome me. The rooms were larger than I had remembered. The destruction was still there, but my friend and her husband had picked up a fair bit of the garbage and so it didn't look, or smell, as bad. I took pictures of all the rooms and showed them to my husband that evening. I was beginning to have a better feel for the place, and it didn't seem so bad.
Then a few days later, I went back to the house with my friend, and we had discovered that the previous tenants had come back and took more stuff. Stuff like the vanity mirror out of the half bath, the shower head in the main bath, the chain ladder to the tree house, light bulbs all over the house, and then they also did more damage like smashing the mirrored closet door (the one with the sticker with the large hooters on it).
It was then that I discovered that my friend wanted me to clean the house for her, which is fine, but I had to also clean my apartment so we could get our deposit back. All this while packing and managing four young kids.
It was a frantic three weeks. I did as much as I could on the new house, which admittedly wasn't much. I figured in the scheme of things, it was lowest on the priority list. I can always paint and get things deep cleaned after moving in. My priority was packing our stuff and moving it over to the house, followed by cleaning the old apartment up before the first of the month. I think I did pretty well as we're getting back a majority of our deposit, which was much more than I was expecting. I also lost eight pounds.
So, now we're moved. The new place has revealed itself to be a wonderful, lovable house. We fit very nicely into the new space, which my husband admitted on the second night here, that maybe he was wrong about estimating its size. It IS bigger than the apartment. Problems are getting dealt with. We're moving in. Very little troubles me about the new home. Just one thing has me flummoxed. I STILL can't find my box of hardware that contains the bolts and screws for my bed, the computer desk, and the kids' bunk bed. I have no idea where I packed it!
