Friday, August 01, 2008

Hauling it in (Moving Days 3)

My first night in alone in the new house in Borderland wasn't as fun as I had thought. It just seemed very lonely and wrong without the wife there. And our inflata-bed, which had served us well during the many weekends we'd spent in the house working on it, was even less comfortable than usual. I couldn't even let Sadie sleep on it, either, for fear her claws would shred it.

For her part, Sadie wasn't much help in alleviating my mood about being alone in the house. Every time I took her out to potty, she would just sit and stare into the woods behind our house with an expression of intense uncertainty at the night sounds. This caused me to also uncertain, for our new house is a good deal more secluded than our previous one and I have no idea what sort of animals roam the woods at night. Sure, it's probably just deer and raccoons, but our state was also home to the most famous Mothman sightings as well, so who can tell?

The next morning, the movers arrived, though not without first calling for directions. They were pretty much the same guys from the day before, including Bud. With only a few exchanges of pleasantries, they backed one of their enormous moving vans up our steep driveway and began hauling boxes in quick as anything.

Unlike the old house, where it didn't really matter if the movers got dirt on the floor cause we were going to clean up anyway, the new place has a carpet to bare floor ratio that's pretty much reversed from the old place. And unfortunately, it rained overnight. Fortunately, Bud had a plan and put down moving blankets throughout the house to keep muddy feet from muddying my carpet. I don't know why I care so much about clean carpet, what with an ever-growing St. Bernard about, but I hate to ruin it before we have to.

I felt really bad for the guy who had to haul in my comics. I think the boxes of them have actually multiplied on their own over the past few years, for there seemed to be far more of them than I recalled owning. Fortunately, the wife and I had been in the previous weekend and had constructed brand new shelving in our office closet capable of storing 16 long boxes, plus two shelves of assorted graphic novels and trades. It's a setup that's been needed for a long time, for I now have office space that isn't half taken up by my stinking comics.

The new place is really hurting for bookshelves otherwise, though. Sure, we have two big and one little flat-pack press board shelving units, but they're fairly worthless for long term book storage and don't go with anything. We'll have to do some shopping for "real" shelving, or perhaps build our own. We only used about two thirds of our asses staining and constructing my comic shelves, as we knew they'd be mostly out of sight. Maybe if we put our whole asses into it we could come up with something nice.

By noon, pretty much all of the boxes were moved in and stacked in the rooms in which they belonged. As we have only one set of living room/den furniture, we put it in the "den" area and left the living room/dining room area as a fallback position for boxes that didn't really fit anywhere else. We'll eventually get around to furnishing that room. After all, if you have a dining room, you probably need a dining room table. And our tiny, four person table is currently being used in the breakfast nook, off the kitchen. We don't really have any desire for a second living room, so perhaps we can come up with something else to do with that space, beyond a dining area. (A man cave, dare I dream?)

Sadie likes the new place too. Unlike our old house, which was built on the side of a steep slope, and therefore had very little usable yard, our new house was built atop a steep hill and the back yard is open and composed of largely flatish ground. Plenty of room to play fetch and set up a run line for her. Eventually, we might consider doing an invisible fence, or, barring that, a visible one. We'll have to see what our needs are.

In the meantime, it's going to take forever to unpack all of our stuff and find new places to keep it. A lot of what we had packed up and moved was stuff we knew we would otherwise have gotten rid of if we'd had the time to set up a yard sale. Since we didn't have to move it ourselves, it didn't bother us so much to keep it around. Still there's weeding to be done. But that can be said of so many moves...

(TO BE CONTINUED...)

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

so true... i'm about to move (this saturday, ahhh!) and i can't wait to just start throwing stuff out left & right.


An employee of a small town "liberry" chronicles his quest to remain sane while dealing with patrons who could star in a short-lived David Lynch television series.