Month: March 2016

The Moving Diary: the preface.

March 24, 2016

I’ve started to plan the packing. We’ll have both houses for a while, so we’re not pressed for time – yet I know that if I don’t have a plan, chaos will take over.

This is what I’m planning. I want to go through each room in this house to do two things: cull unwanted items, for donation or for landfill, and pack up things not needed immediately: winter clothes, books, rarely-used kitchen equipment, ornaments. That should take about three weeks of intermittent work, the time ranging from a couple of hours at the most for the bathroom to six-to-eight hours for the kitchen. We can get most of that done before the possession date of April 29th. In much of May, when the new house is having its gas fireplace installed, and the interior painted, I’ll need to be there to let the workers in and out and answer questions. I can take a carload of boxed items over every day; they can sit in the garage if nowhere else, while I ensure cupboards are clean and determine what goes where in the kitchen.

After that, we’ll spend a day packing the last of the fragile items, move the cats to the new house – they can have the run of the basement – and let the professionals take over. We have detailed floor plans of the new house and have spent the last couple of weeks playing with furniture placements. We may move things a few inches here and there, but basically we know what is going where, which will be easier for the movers. We’ll have those plans with us, printed and on our ipads, the day of the move.

I’m making lists: we need boxes, bubble wrap, packing tape, scotch tape. I’ll need to contact the charity that will come to pick up the boxes of donated items, saving me endless trips to their drop-off location. I have to book a mover, arrange another viewing of the house to measure windows for blinds, look at kitchen cupboard size and arrangements, and think about paint colours. Then arrange to meet with the gas-fireplace installers and the painters. And all the hundred other little things – the utilities, the change-of-addresses, the insurance – at least we’ll be keeping our cell phone numbers.

You’ll note I haven’t even begun to think about prepping this current house for sale. We decided we wouldn’t do that yet. We can afford, thank goodness, to carry both for a while. It will cost us a bit in the bridge financing, but it will be worth it in reduced stress. When this one is empty, it too can be cleaned and patched-painted-and-polished. I’m not going to try to do both at the same time. Because, among other things, this is all happening in May. Migration month. The best birding of the entire year. We bought a house expressly because it adjoins excellent birding habitat: we can walk out the front door into an area with an impressive migration bird list. We don’t plan to miss May birding, moving or no – it’s just a compromise: birding in the early mornings, moving chores later in the day.

We figure we can just about handle birding, new-house-prep, and old-house-cull-and-pack (although we’re going to try to do most of that in April)  in that time but we can’t add any more. Meals may be a bit ad hoc, laundry will get done at odd hours, and I certainly won’t get much writing done. Organized chaos is the best I can hope for.

Tell me about your moving experiences…what lessons can you pass on? Am I completely crazy?

Butter Curlers and Junk Drawers.

March 16, 2016

Our new house passed its inspection with flying colours, so now we’re just waiting for the results of the appraisal on our current house. The actual appraisal occurred yesterday; when the credit union will get back to us with the approval for the bridge-financing I’m not sure, but somewhere in the next few days. We’re 99.9% sure the house is worth more than the amount we need, so we’re pretty safe to go ahead with the planning.

This is, of course, a wonderful opportunity to cull yet again. We’re not significantly (ok, not at all) downsizing, so we could take everything. But I don’t want to: I may not have yet disposed of a dozen flower vases and the same number of cookie tins from simple inertia, but that doesn’t mean I’m going to pack them up and move them, because then I’d have to unpack them and put them away again. I have four major areas to cull: kitchen stuff, clothes, books, and knick-knacks.

Clothes, I think, will be the simplest. I did dispose of quite a lot when I stopped working almost a year ago, but now I have a much better idea of what I actually wear: jeans or khakis, cotton shirts, and sweatshirts, depending on the time of year. I’m going to choose from the rest a few mix-and-match pieces that will take me to a wedding, a funeral, or a nice dinner, and donate the rest. I can always buy it back (or something similar) from the thrift store if I make a mistake.

Kitchen stuff should also be fairly easy: if I haven’t used it in the past year, why do I have it? I bake frequently, and cook for dinner parties often, so I should have a good idea of what I do and don’t use. In fact, I know I own things like a butter curler (to slice off little curls of butter for a fancy butter arrangement for a fancy dinner party, in case you’re wondering). I have never, ever, used it. BD is allergic to butter. We dip bread in olive oil. It’s not moving with us. I’m guessing I’ll need to label it for the thrift store, though.

Books. Hmmm. Actually not as bad as it might be: we’ve become pretty good in the last years about culling the books, because otherwise they would take over the house. We’re likely down to fewer than two hundred, and we rarely buy new ones. So not too bad. Except every so often I do give a book away, and then want to read it again a year later. But we both have library cards.

Knick-knacks. I have to say I am NOT a collector of things that gather dust, but inevitably we have a lot we were given. I have trouble giving away something someone gave me, unless they live on the other side of the world and will never know. They chose it for me and gave it to me thinking I’d like it. This will be my biggest problem. Although we did get away with ‘oh, it’s still unpacked in the attic, we’re waiting to put up more shelves’ for a very long time in the current house, so perhaps I can try that? It worked very well, now I think of it.

And then there are things like the filing cabinet with twenty-four years worth of records of everything from oil bills to credit card purchases to the warranties on the well pump and the inspection records for the septic system that have to be sorted through. And a cupboard full of gift bags, and a garage full of wood scraps BD thought might be useful some day. And the junk drawer. The junk drawer is scary.

I’ll report on how this all goes over the next few weeks. If I maintain my sanity, that is. Any hints on how to do that will be gladly received. Anyone want a butter curler, by the way?

Changes

March 12, 2016

It’s been a while since I posted anything, and that’s because life has moved very quickly in the last three weeks.

One of the things our two months in England confirmed for us was that we want to live somewhere where we’re less dependent on the car to run errands.  The second thing was that we could quite happily live in a bungalow, and the third was that we really liked not being responsible for the lawn and garden.  We’d thought it was time to leave this old two-storey rural house, with its quarter-acre of lawn and garden, 10 miles from anywhere: what England told us is that we were right.

We always said we’d move before it was too late, when we could make the choice. We came home, spent some time wandering around neighbourhoods in the university town north of us that we know well and love.  We narrowed it down to two, and then to one.  And yesterday, we bought a house.

It’s not quite a bungalow, in that it has a bedroom and ensuite on a second floor, but we don’t need to use those except for guests, or, for the foreseeable future, as BD’s study.  It’s a 10 minute walk to the university’s arboretum, for walking and birding; a 15 minute walk (or 5  minutes on the bike) to the university library, where I like to work, a ten-minute walk to a grocery store, on quiet back roads. We can bike downtown, to movies, to lunch, to the arts centre, to the bookstore, to the summer outdoor concerts.

While we own the house, and can do what we like with it, indoors and out, we don’t own the land it sits on: the university does.  So we pay, effectively, condo fees – and for that we get the lawn and garden taken care of, the snow ploughed and shovelled to our front steps, and the use of a large and well-equipped recreation centre. Or, as BD put it yesterday, to be permanently on vacation.

It’s ours in just less than two months, assuming all goes well with the inspection and the bridge financing – we have to get the existing house on the market, but there’s a bit of work to be done yet.  The new house needs its interior walls painted and a few other cosmetic bits and pieces.  One thing for sure, this adventure over the next couple of months – as we try to do this as mindfully as possible, fitting what we already own into the new house, figuring out what we really need (like a new bed), disposing of what we don’t – will give me plenty to write about!