Home Ownership · October 5, 2020 4

Moving Sucks

I forgot how much moving sucks. It was probably worse this time because we had accumulated so much stuff since the last time we moved.

We received the keys on August 25 around 2pm. We were hoping to get three rooms painted that day, but also expected to get the keys closer to noon. We ended up not even getting one room finished. By the end of the week, we (or more like my boyfriend, as I didn’t get to do any of the painting) only got two rooms finished. But that’s okay, the other room can wait.

On August 26 we rented a U-Haul and moved as many of the boxes as we could on our own. It was hard work. I think we got about two loads moved over with the truck that day. We had to return it the next day. On the 27th we continued moving as much as we could using our own vehicles, leaving mostly just the big heavy items.

On August 28 we hired movers to move the rest of our items. The showed up about 30 minutes late and took more breaks than I thought was necessary, but they were doing the work I didn’t want to do so I wasn’t too mad about it. It took them from about 9:30 to around 3pm to move all of our furniture. There was one wall that got damaged in the new house but they gave us a partial refund to cover the repair so I was happy with that.

I believe that was the first day that we all stayed at the new house for the night. I was a little worried about how Elliott would adjust to the move but he didn’t seem phased at all. I made sure that his room was the first one that got set up as close to how it was set up at the old house as I could. I also made sure to unpack some of the kitchen boxes right away so we would be able to eat breakfast without any issues.

One thing that made our move a little bit easier, at least for me, was that I was laid off from my job the week before. While that in itself is not great, it did make unpacking less stressful due to not being as rushed.

It took me about 2 weeks or so for the house to actually feel like it was ours. Beforehand it still felt like it belonged to the other gentleman. I think as I had time to start getting rooms cleaned helped me a lot. I also get really stressed out when there are boxes and chaos around me so as we slowly started getting boxes unpacked, my stress levels started to drop.

We have been in the house for a month now and most of the boxes have been put away. We got shelves up in the garage and basement for storage and that has helped a lot as well.

Shortly after moving in I was finding that the dishwasher wasn’t cleaning my dishes. I called someone to come in and take a look at it and there was a part that was broken and it had been leaking for a long time. For that week I had to hand wash the dishes which I really hate doing. I was really worried that I was going to start my new job and still not have a working dishwasher.

Underneath the dishwasher was all wet and I’m sure there is probably water under some of the tiles. We weighed the pros and cons of having it repaired vs. buying a new one and decided to get a new one. So that was one of our first major upgrades to the house. We removed one or two of the kitchen tiles and my boyfriend installed the new dishwasher. In the future he says he would rather hire someone to install it because it took him nearly all day. But we now have a working dishwasher!

We also bought new furniture for the master bedroom from Ikea. We bought a King sized bed, dresser, and two side tables. So there was a lot of furniture building for the first few weeks as well. For my office I also bought some storage for my board games and a rug, as well as a rug for Elliott’s room.

We still need to buy a new dining table because ours is probably as old as I am and we now only have two chairs left because they keep breaking. We would also like to buy a new couch and another rug or two, but that can wait.

At this point we just want to wait and see what our bills are going to look like over the next few months. We are anxious to start doing some updating/finishing projects. But we also don’t want to run out of money haha.