Thanks to Paul for covering my unprepared butt while I was moving this weekend…
Last October, my fiancee and I decided it was time to move on. Our townhouse had served us well, but we were outgrowing it and wanted a quieter place to spend our twilight years. Wait… scratch that last part.
We began looking for apartments and found one place that offered large apartments at a decent price in a nice enough area. But because of all sorts of snafus with our lease and a limited number of available apartments, about November we decided to start looking at houses.
It was quite a process — my wonderful buyer’s agent showed me probably a dozen houses in person. Some were OK, some were terrible (the worst of which ended with me knocking down their neighbor’s mailbox on my way out of the driveway). But come January, I doubted whether we’d find anywhere to live, and we were growing quite tired of our townhouse arrangement.
Fortunately, just in time, Debby came up with a place that we both liked at a price that was at our upper-limit. We made an offer on the house after it had been on the market less than a week and they accepted it. We managed to get a 2-story house (with a basement) offering well over twice the amount of space of our townhouse. The house was less than 2 years old, in very good shape, in a relatively quiet area of town, and less than 15 minutes from my work (rather than the 45-60 I was driving before).
So, last week, on Monday, we settled on the house. We began to move our boxes over throughout the week and we used Saturday to bring in some friends to help us move furniture and what we thought would be a few remaining boxes. But boy were we wrong — by the time all was said and done, we used a 15′ Penske truck, packed to the max, and a total of 20 carloads (spread out over a week’s time) to get everything to our new place. We had no idea exactly how big of a process this kind of move was.
I guess a lot of it comes from the fact that I never moved as a kid (aside from when I was 1 1/2 years old). My moving experience was limited to college dorm rooms, an apartment one summer, and the move to the townhouse — but all of those moves were minor moves because my “original” home is still where my parents live and still where I visit every month or two. This move marks my first major move from a place that I’m leaving behind after having been there for 20 months. Even though there are countless things I won’t miss about the place (parking, loud neighbors, rude kids), I’ll still remember it (somewhat) fondly as my first real place away from home. -ram
Posted in Everyday Life