And we’re off!
Monday was moving day. I do not know how our small house held so much stuff. Despite frequent culling and a somewhat ruthless approach to sentimentality, there was an endless stream of items that needed transport. It teemed. Halfway through I was ready to set the truck on fire and go back to a simpler time when all my earthly belongings could be crammed into a sedan.
Mercifully, the rental house has a two-car garage that will never know a motor vehicle. It is now packed floor-to-ceiling, ass-to-ankles with the contents our former/future one-car garage plus a whole bunch of boxes and bins that need not see the light of day until we move back. There are three boxes that just contain champagne flutes and fancy drinking glasses. Pre-pandemic me had lots of cocktail party hosting aspirations, apparently.
Here were the highlights of our move:
Husband accidentally dislodged the fiber optic thingamajig the day prior and the rental house didn’t even have cable. Let the record show that the Daughters lived without wifi for 36 hours.
We found an envelope with $562 in cash in a drawer. The envelope was from a now-defunct company where the Husband worked nearly two decades ago. Neither of us have any context for this, but it saved us a trip to the ATM for mover tips.
Despite being sequestered and monitored for most of the day, Bertram still managed to escape his confines and saunter off into the house’s crawl space, much to the surprise of the AT&T dude trying to make the internet happen for a couple of teenage girls now twitchy with streaming withdrawal.
The rental house is in a charming neighborhood with really lovely neighbors. A few dropped by to introduce themselves and say hello while we were moving in. As near as I can tell, the house has been owned by the same family for over half a century. I’m a little nervous about the plumbing; the jump from single widower to family of four can be a lot on old pipes, especially when a couple of family members are, shall we say, enthusiasts of toilet paper. So far our only major complaint is that the central A/C either does not work or is woefully incapable of covering the square footage.
Meanwhile, over at The Project…the construction fence is up!!!
We did a walkthrough with our contractor yesterday, and he gave us a rough timeline of the events to come. Demo starts today and will run through the first half of August. I was surprised how detached I felt from the existing house as we said a final farewell, especially since last Saturday night found me teary (and tipsy) and composing unpublished blog posts with lines like “I’m sorry for all the times I noticed your thin walls and not your faceted doorknobs.” Home really is where your life is, and mine has moved on.
