And then everyone took a deep breath...or did they?
/
How many blog posts have I written in my head over the last few
I did a little math - I've moved seven times since I had enough furniture to require more than a sedan. Do I have complete selective memory, or was this move really significantly worse than average?
After going back and forth with the folks moving into our old apartment about when they needed to be able to move-in, with the tenants (our friends) of the apartment we were going to move into about how early they would be able to move out, with both sets of landlords about how much time they would need to clean the respective apartments - after coming to an agreement that worked for everyone, I thought we were golden.
And then packing took much longer than we thought it would, and we still had tons of furniture to get rid of on the day before the move. We finally put everything up for free on Craigslist and, in the midst of finishing packing, spent that day answering emails and phone calls, arranging pick-up times, and hauling heavy furniture into the cars of people that we thanked profusely for needing our old things. All of this was done with an underlying panic that our movers would not show up the next day to move us. They had never called to confirm, I had forgotten to call at the end of the prior week, and the day before our move - Memorial Day - no one was in the office to answer the phones. We had to be out of our apartment by 11:00 am on Tuesday (see the above paragraph on compromises over moving dates), so if our movers didn't show up that morning at 9:00, I had no idea what we were going to do. Before we went to bed, I made a list of all the movers in the city and their phone numbers so that I could quickly call around if our movers didn't show up.
At 8:01am (they opened at 8:00), I called the movers, and after a terrifying moment when they said they didn't have us in the system (we realized they were spelling the name wrong), the very nice man confirmed that movers were on their way - after he laughed and told me to relax. I breathed a deep sigh of relief and put away my list.
But all of those things are sort of normal move stuff. Packing always takes too long. There are always kinks to work out.
The kicker came when we got to our new place and realized that the carpet was still wet from our landlord's shampooing it two days before. Because only the kitchen and the bathroom aren't carpeted, we began unpacking only those areas and consolidating boxes on the tile floor. But neither of those rooms are very big, and furniture certainly wasn't going to fit in there. We had a real concern that the carpet might mildew or mold if allowed to dry out naturally (especially since it had already been two days), so the landlord brought over several dehumidifiers and fans. For the next two days, our furniture and boxes played a game of musical chairs. The carpet couldn't dry with something on it, so in the morning we got up and moved furniture, boxes, and dehumidifiers around, and we followed the same routine in the evening when we got home from work. We couldn't really unpack because there was no where to put things. It was slow going, and I came close to crying on Thursday morning when we discovered that the giant rented dehumidifier in the living room had leaked all over the floor. That sent the landlord back to the hardware store for a big carpet dryer contraption and an industrial fan.
Navah was my hero through all of it, running home from work during her lunch break on Wednesday to move boxes, and going into work late in the mornings so that I didn't have to (and could still get some sleep). But we were both feeling pretty miserable about the whole thing until Thursday evening, when the noise of the fans and dehumidifiers was so loud that we escaped to the front porch with Jammer to eat some yummy falafel platters that I brought home from an adorable local coffee and sandwich shop. Sitting outside, watching people coming and going, I knew we had made the right choice - wet carpet or not. Though we really liked our ninth floor view of the city in the old apartment, we missed having a yard and a ground-level connection to the world around us.
And right then I started to write a post in my head about how things had been rough at the outset, but we were settling into our new place (though our carpet was still wet at the time), and we were really going to love it here. And the next morning, I added in a bit about how delightful is was to get ready in the morning to the soundtrack of birds chirping in the backyard. And then Friday night, the carpet was dry and we unpacked the rest of the kitchen, and I penciled in some sentences about how amazing the deep drawers were and how cute our little bathroom was going to be. We were so busy with all the unpacking that I could only write the post in my head. There was no time to sit down and devote to the computer. But after several hours of sofa shopping on Sunday (which I'll write about more later), a little unpacking, and some real job work, I was super excited to put together the Ikea sofa that had been delivered, put away the folding chairs that had been standing in for a couch, and sit down to write a post about our awesome new apartment.
And while the apartment is, in fact, awesome, I'm actually writing this while I lean up against the box that holds the various pieces of our new sofa because when we pulled out the cushions at 8:45 pm, one of them was torn. I was so close to just slapping some duck tape on it and yanking on the slipcover, but Navah prevailed upon me to wait and call Ikea on Monday (they were already closed for the night) to see if we can have it picked up and get a new one delivered.
So, though things are on the upswing from last week, I'm feel cranky and unsettled. I want a couch to sit on. I want a closet to hang my clothes in (that's a whole other post that you'll be getting sometime soon, hopefully).
But I'm taking a deep breath....and letting it out...and again....and out...and remembering how great this place is going to be and how lucky we are to have jobs and each other and an apartment that we can afford. Everything else - couches and back yards and fireplaces and perhaps even dry carpet - is just icing.
Of course, when I was six or so, I was chowing down on dessert at a church potluck, and this elderly lady asked how I liked the cake that she had made. I told her, as I licked the icing off the top, that it would be better without all the bread part.
I suppose we never really change, do we?
Katie
