Settling in

Yes, we’re settling in to our new house! Despite a few issues last week, everything ended well, and we had time to clean up the old house and get it ready for its new owner before the handover on Friday.

The biggest snag was that the movers did not show up on Wednesday as had been agreed upon over the phone. When I called them to see where they were, they said they had us on the books for Thursday, and that there was no way they could scratch a crew up to get us moved Wednesday. I don’t think they entirely believed that they had made a mistake, they were so confident that their notes had to be complete and accurate. But, we made the best of it (after Amy convinced me not to rent a truck and do it myself…) and spent Wednesday organizing what we had already moved to the house ourselves and moving a few more things so we could spend the night there as we had planned. I also took the opportunity to wire the key areas of the house for our network so we’d be up and running once Verizon paid a visit on Thursday. Between a surprisingly comfortable air mattress, a stack of blankets and pillows for Sydney, and a pack-n-play for Peter, we enjoyed the night in the new, almost entirely empty house.

Thursday morning the movers showed up, and in no time flat (they said we were their favorite move of the week because we had things so well organized, dressers emptied, crib disassembled, etc) they had us loaded and we were off to the new house. Amy and a friend from church went to the old house that night to clean up while I moved over all of the computer equipment and network gear.

Let me stop here and just say that we had a tremendous amount of help with this move, none more appreciated than all the time my Mom selflessly gave both watching the kiddos while we moved as well as helping Amy unpack and get the new house ready to live in. We couldn’t have made this move without her! A handful of folks from church also helped us with the things we did not want the professional movers to handle as well as all the prep work on the old and new houses. And our first houseguest, Matt Reichenbach, was pressed into service this weekend on a number of tasks such as getting the garage organized and ready to park a car in. He didn’t complain once! Our heartfelt thanks to you all!

The new owner of our old house made a comment that "moving is a lot of work, and not fun!" While I heartily agree with that comment as it affects packing, moving, and cleaning, I have to say that unpacking and arranging things in our new house has been fun, though still a lot of work. We love the new house and the extra room it affords, and it has been fun to think about and execute on an organization scheme that does not require as much creative use of space (think kids’ clothing and toys…)

I hope to put up some "before and after" pictures to compare the two houses, but since we didn’t think to take fresh pictures of the old house before we moved, I’ll have to go back through my files and dig out pictures we took when painting, etc. In the meantime, we’d love to have more visitors! We had our small group study over last night, and we’ll be having our church fellowship group over this Friday for dinner, followed by some friends and their kids on Saturday morning. If that doesn’t indoctrinate the new house, I’m not sure what will!