Moving Fun!

I'm having entirely too much fun with this moving thing. Jer and I took over two loads of stuff today. We keep telling Connor that we're driving out to the "summer chateau." Connor just looks at us like we're nuts.

When we moved to Washington from Texas, we lugged everything with us. I mean everything. I'd moved three and a half hours from our little loft-style apartment to my parents' house when I was seven months pregnant to be near the hospital, and so our "moving" consisted of Jer and our landlord throwing everything we owned into a box and putting it directly into a storage unit, until we had the movers load it all on a truck and drive it out here. Rubber band ball? Check. Scrap paper with doodles on it? Got it. Used tissues? Lovingly packaged. I'd put a lot of our things into large plastic containers, which the movers took everything out of, repacked it in their own boxes, and then carefully filled the containers with wadded up paper so they wouldn't break in transport. There's our house just before the movers got there with all our stuff-- we were in the house for two days with no furniture. Like our table?

This will be the first move where I have the time to actually sort through things and figure out what needs to go and what we can live without. Jer watched me dance around in a giddy fashion in the new apartment today with my tape measure figuring out where all of the furniture can go. He's seen this before-- I do a similar thing every year with my garden. Now I'll make up a little floor plan with my 8,000 measurements and cut out minuscule replicas of all of our furniture, which I will arrange inside the tiny paper rooms for hours. I'll come up with grandiose plans of painting all our bookcases in matching colors, and I'll carefully sort through each drawer, putting things in piles for storage, donation, or the house. I'll wrap all of our breakable items in paper, and then when I get to the apartment I'll unwrap everything and put it away right that second.

This happy, leisurely style of moving will last for approximately three weeks, when I'll realize that we only have ten days left to move out of the house and half of our stuff is still there. Then the frantic dance of the Persistent Procrastinator will begin. I'll run around gibbering in a packing frenzy, and two months later I will find all of the screws for our still-disassembled bookcase, three missing earrings, and a penny inside a set of matryoshka nesting dolls stuffed into the toe of one of Jeremy's socks.

But for now, I'll continue to make grandiose plans, take over one car load at a time, and dream about having one of those places that looks like something on Apartment Therapy.

~Jess