6/6/08 MOVED!

Whew -- we did it! Now we just have to dig out of piles and piles of boxes at our "new" home. Both Dave and I have trouble calling it home.

I'm writing from our "old" house, as we don't have phone or Internet at the new one yet. It's completely empty, echo-y, yet still so familiar. The walls and floors are filled with memories and familiar feelings. I look around and think, "this is where I brought my three children home after they were born." I can't imagine what it'll be like when we really move from here.

The move went really really well, thanks to a very organized moving company and an efficient crew. They gave us boxes ahead of time to pre-pack, lots of advice on packing, and suggested we move the bedrooms over the first day. This worked really well, and then some. The intent was to pack until early afternoon, including loading all the bedroom furntiture and boxes. Then they'd bring over the bedrooms, unload those, re-assemble beds, and unload bedroom boxes so that we'd have bedding and clothes.

In practice, the unload didn't start until much later, because they decided to push and load the ENTIRE house the first day. This made for a very hectic 2 hours -- was it only two hours?! -- in which ten guys were unloading things far faster than I could direct them. They'd called for more guys and trucks, so in the end, there were four trucks and crews there unloading. I was getting frantic because Dave was going to arrive with three tired hungry children in a few minutes and I was still directing streams of guys with boxes and all kinds of stuff.

(Not to mention, take a WILD guess here, a splitting, vicious, horrendous headache that would not go away. Zooming around helped me forget it for a moment at a time, but if I stopped to breathe, it would slam me in waves of excruciating pain. It wasn't a migraine yet, just a severe headache, but naturally developed into a migraine today.)

During the unload, one of the guys brought in a wall shelf in Katrina's room I'd marked "LEAVE HERE," and asked the foreman, "Where does this go? It's marked LEAVE HERE!" Next time, I'll make a bigger effort to find color-coded tape to mark things to leave behind!

They got everything except one truck unloaded, bedrooms set up, and went home at about 6:30. We went out to dinner, after a wild goose chase for an item I very foolishly didn't set aside and is now buried in an anonymous box somewhere: Katrina's sippy cup. This morning, the truck with the remainder of our things returned, and it was a very easy unload, plus a trip to our "old" house for a refrigerator. We were done by 10:30am.

Suggestion to anyone moving soon: mark all your outlets, phone jacks and cable outlets high on the wall in your new place BEFORE furniture blocks them all!

And now, the monumental task of digging out. We have way WAY too much stuff -- I was tempted to tell them to just turn the truck around and go straight to Good Will! Since then, I've looked around our garage, and I'm horrified. It would take days to dig out of there. Thank goodness we don't have to. I'm determined to come back to this house with less stuff than we left it with.

6/6/08