You might not see me for a few days because my beautiful, clutter-free home has been defiled by the arrival of our household goods. I complained about the fact that it took 2 months to get here, but except for my bed and my sheets, it turns out that it’s all crap.
My moving plan is to have the movers unpack as much as possible so all the boxes and paper leave the house. That forces me to deal with the remaining mess immediately (or at least as soon as humanly possible). This way, I can go from boxes to “comfortable, lived in home” look in less than a week. Of course it’s the week from hell, and the mountains of clothes and books on the floor when the movers leave aren’t pretty, but when you’re only in a house for a year or two, you can’t take 3 months to move in. The move I’m most proud of is Monterey — we had photos hung, everything unpacked and the garden tilled and planted in under 7 days. That was in the days pre-girlie, which explains a lot.
I didn’t even take a picture of the kitchen because it makes me want to weep. All this moving has finally caught up with me. I have 1/2 the cupboard space of our Oman kitchen and there are dishes, silverware, pots and pans, and other kitchen items covering every square inch of shelf and counter space. I have to thin drastically. I think I’ll start with getting rid of 2 of the 3 can openers that I have somehow managed to collect. And since I bought some silverware to get us through until our shipment arrived, now I have something like 34 butter knives. Anyone need a few mugs? We have enough to open our own Starbucks.
Carter said, “I think this is our hardest move yet. I don’t remember Oman being like this.” You know why? Cause in Oman we had Lucy. She was unpacking the kitchen as soon as the movers started taking boxes off the truck and she had sheets washed and on our bed and clean towels in the bathrooms before I had finished checking off the inventory sheets.
Also not making this move easier? This fashionista who has her own system of unpacking/messmaking. I have to have one kid assigned to her, one kid assigned to the dog, and Caleb flies under the radar and doesn’t do anything except dig through boxes looking for his Harry Potter movies. I’ll be lucky if I finish in less than a month.