Tuesday we put in our move-out notice at our rented house. The closing date for our new, first home is set for next week. I booked movers for Weds Oct 30.
Oh my goodness, this is really happening! I have so many conflicting and simultaneous feelings.
There are two “biggest” ones. The first is a bittersweet, pre-nostalgia for this house. We’ve lived here for seven years! This has been our first home; we’ve built our life while here. We brought our babies home here and they have grown and changed and laughed and cried here. We’ve truly settled into this house. Expanding into the basement with our growing holiday decor, and my office space. Changing layouts in the living room several times. Little hardware additions in the bathroom. Bemoaning the jungle growth in the yard and periodically trying to work on it. Our family has inhabited every inch of this house, physically and emotionally. This house feels like it’s actually a member of the family. There’s no way we could stay here forever, so it’s been inevitable that we’d leave and move. But it feels hard and sad and emotional.
The next biggest feeling–maybe the biggest–is overwhelm. We moved here from a one-bedroom apartment. And now we have filled a house with three bedrooms plus garage and basement. There is SO MUCH STUFF. I look around and think, oh my god, how can we ever get all of this organized and packed?! I do want to do some purging too as we go. But that will also take time. We have under four weeks. This is simultaneously a long time and a very short time!
Yesterday I looked around social media for free boxes and picked up three different sets, plus I have one more big set to get today. This is one good discrete task to focus on now and work on, so that we’ll be ready to get started. But how soon should we actually get started? It’s very tempting to start now, just because we could and every little bit helps. But I also don’t want to live with piles of boxes everywhere for four weeks. Of course, at some point–two weeks maybe?–it’s inevitable that our life will become boxes. The boys are excited and eager to start packing (I think that might change though, when it becomes more frequent and necessary) and last night started going through some of their small toys. (It only lasted a few minutes before they got distracted by drawing (M) and writing (E).
We decided to do the big move with movers on a school day with after-school, so that they wouldn’t get bored, restless and whiny. That will be a long day and them being underfoot would make it tougher. It’s going to be a really strange day though, waking up in one house and having to return and go to bed in a different house! I wonder if we’ll really be able to get beds and necessities set up in so little time. And then the next day will be Halloween, to add to the chaos. The boys were concerned about that recently. They want to be able to give out candy at our current house. And sadly it doesn’t make sense to decorate our house this month–but maybe we should anyway? I don’t want to skip the whole Halloween spirit season–the boys always enjoy it.
We have SO MUCH WORK ahead of us! It’s going to be very exciting though–we’re buying a house!!
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