We moved this weekend - which if you read the newsletter we sent out you would know - and here’s the tale of it.
Thursday came and we began loading all of our earthly possessions into a U-Haul truck. We don’t own much but some of the things we own are very, very heavy. We have this tool box…but that story comes later. First things first.
The New Apartment: We got such a great price on this apartment because it was a non-renovated unit…meaning, it desperately needs to be renovated. The kitchen is like a nightmare from the 70’s. Dark brown everything (we are going to ask if we can paint the cupboards). But of course they’ve installed a dishwasher…which has to be open in order to open one of the drawers. The floor plan of this apartment is really strange, too. I’m going to start at the front door (although we can’t use it as such yet because the key doesn’t work in that lock). You walk into the living room. In the far right corner is a spiral staircase leading to the master bedroom and bathroom (the biggest bedroom we’ve ever had, which is funny because we can’t take any of our furniture up there). Straight ahead from the door is the dining room which connects to the kitchen on the right. The kitchen is a U-shaped kitchen…a dark hole. It’s small but I’ve trimmed back so much of my kitchen stuff that everything fits. Continue back from the front door and next you come to a hallway. The doorway to your right leads into a double closet…that is a closet rod on your left and one on your right. Continue through this closet and you enter the bathroom. Why in the world you enter the bathroom through the closet, we don’t know. Continue down the hallway and you enter the second bedroom, Jael’s room. Well, actually, it’s the storage room and Jael’s room. We’ve used a shelving unit and our dressers to block her off her own little space. It sounds all mean and stingy but she actually really likes it. It’s a lot more her size than a full size bedroom. And it’s much easier for her to clean up and to understand the concept of “only get out one thing at a time.” If you continue through her bedroom, you will exit the apartment through the second door.
You may be thinking something along the lines of “A door to the outside in a child’s room? That’s not safe!” Yeah, that’s pretty much what we thought. Especially since the door is a weather beaten, used up, piece of crap. We turn in a list tomorrow of all the things that need to be fixed or replaced and the door is the first one. If it’s not fixed within a week, we’ll have to take legal measures because it’s really not secure. But we did get a police lock and so we think we’d hear someone breaking in before they actually get through.
So at first we were really not impressed with our apartment. The management is out for themselves (revealed by the leasing agent refusing to go up the spiral stairs when she showed us the apartment, claiming she was afraid of heights. Upon further inspection we realized that two of the welds on the stairs were broken. I think it was a fear of falling to her death on a broken stairway that kept her from climbing them but oh, well), which is fine as long as we know it and we do. The apartment wasn’t very clean but that just means we don’t have to leave it very clean when we leave. As we get settled and get our stuff put away (and throw away a lot more stuff), we are liking it more and more.
The Move: We tried something new this move and we won’t do it again. We tried moving all the furniture in one go with a truck and then all the small things in the car. The reasoning behind this was the fact that we didn’t have very many boxes. So I thought I would move little stuff all day and unpack it each trip. Then the next day, Israel and I would move all the furniture with a rental truck. Boom. We’re done. Except that it didn’t work that way at all. What ended up happening was we rented a truck. We spent almost an hour getting the truck. The dude working there was sick, as in ill, and he’d forgotten to take his medicine the night before so that morning he’d taken two and he was supposed to take them with food but he didn’t. So he was basically stoned out of his mind. He sat there for about five minutes staring at my driver’s license with his fingers resting on the keyboard but not actually typing anything. Israel and I figure he took a little bit of a nap. But we got the truck and loaded all of our large crap. Then we unloaded. Oh, did I mention that our front door is on the second level? Yeah, a full flight of stairs to the apartment. I’ve never been so sick of lifting furniture in my life. We got to the front of the truck and five things were waiting for us. The washer and dryer, two big, heavy boxes, and the tool box. If my dad is reading this he knows what I’m talking about when I say the tool box is really, really, really, really heavy. Do you understand that it’s really heavy? I think Israel said he estimated it at about 600-700 pounds. So we drove home (to the house) with those things still in the truck, deciding to deal with them the next day.
The Move, Day Two: We loaded up the Goodwill stuff into the back of the truck (adding it to the few things left from the day before). We drove to the Goodwill drop off spot and learned that they don’t open in the winter until 9 AM. It’s just 8 AM and the truck is due back at 10:45. We’ve just driven about 5 miles (10 miles round trip) out of our way and now it looks like we’re going to have to do it again in an hour. Luckily, as we sat there beefing about it and trying to decide if we should just dump our stuff outside the trailer, the guy who runs it showed up and unlocked the gate. We unloaded the Goodwill stuff and headed to the apartment. The first thing we tackled was the toolbox. We needed to get it done ASAP, before our muscles tired at all. We moved the tool box by (I’m sorry, Dad) dragging it up the steps, one step at a time. I was on the top and Israel on the bottom and we just lifted the thing one step at a time. I almost cried at the top, my body hurt so much. But we got it done. Everything else seemed easier after the tool box was done. We got the truck returned on time (to a different guy, thank goodness) and decided to go pick up Jael from day care. She’d been there all day the day before and all morning this day and quite frankly, we missed her.
Day Care: We went to the room Israel had signed her into and she wasn’t there. That’s okay, they switch drop-in kids around depending on teacher to child ratio’s. Yeah, except that she didn’t know where Jael was. After a couple of phone calls, they were able to locate her but we, quite quickly, came to the decision that never again would she be placed in a situation where someone could loose her. So we took her back to the house and laid her down for a nap and began packing small stuff up. We made a number of runs to the apartment and then retired that evening, ready to begin cleaning in the morning.
Cleaning Day One: Military Inspection. It sounds scary. And until you’ve gone through one, it is scary. You read the list of things you are supposed to do and you don’t really even know where to begin. So we started at one end of the house and started cleaning. We painted over dark marks on the wall (and scotch tape residue that I couldn’t get off), we dusted mini-blinds. (But we didn’t wash them. SSSHHH. Don’t tell anyone.) We washed window sills. Israel cleaned the bathrooms and the kitchen. To be honest, he’s much better at cleaning than I am. He’s does a faster job and the end result is just as good as my slow way (except of course that he’s done so much faster). So he did that while I took care of Jael and did the mini-blinds, walls, and shelves. I don’t remember if we finished up inside on Day One or if we finished it on Day Two…it had to be Day Two because we slept there on Day One. Okay, So we were pretty much done except for the floor and the outside.
Cleaning Day Two: The outside. We raked the front yard. We edged the front. We removed all the weeds from all the cracks in the driveway, sidewalk, and curb. We washed off the chalk art of one Jael Walker. We didn’t wash the walls or rake the back yard. We didn’t mow either, except for a patch of lemon grass. I didn’t want to dig it up because I didn’t have dirt to fill in a hole and I didn’t have sod to lay over it. So we mowed it and the inspector didn’t notice. But it smelled wonderful when Israel mowed over it. I wish I would have utilized it more while we had it but oh well. That all said and done, we finished mopping inside. We locked up and went home to, well, home.
First Night Sleeping in New Apartment: Some of you may remember how much Jael struggled when we moved from Knightsbride to Hilltop. How I had to lay down with her until she fell asleep. How I had to do that for about three weeks. Some of you may remember how we had to do a similar things in Monterey and when we first moved here. Well, not this move. She laid down and we didn’t hear a peep out of her. I think a lot of it was because she was just so tired. She played in the dirt, searching for rocks while we raked and what not. It was good for her. So she fell right to sleep. Israel and I each had a drink, he a dark beer and I a fruity, girly “malt beverage” and hit the sack.
Inspection Day: The inspection was at 1030. I dropped Israel off at work, came back to the apartment, fed Jael breakfast, went back to the house to mop again (we’d noticed some spots we missed the day before), went grocery shopping, picked Israel up for the inspection and got back to the house with about 20 minutes to spare. Of course the inspector was 15 minutes early so really, we were right on time. He walked through the house. He didn’t look at the blinds I dusted. He didn’t check the baseboards I’d mopped. He didn’t run his hands over the closet doors I’d cleaned. He shut the cupboard doors, poked his head in each room, checked out the garbage cans (which we had to clean and deodorize), and passed us. Just like that. We were done.
So there isn’t much more to tell. We still don’t have Internet yet (this is early Wednesday morning that I’m typing this) but we should have it by the end of today. Sometime between 8 am and 5 pm the cable person is supposed to be out here. Yeah, real respectful of my time. But I don’t have anything else to do today but hang around the house so it’s not that big of a deal.
Oh, one last thing. Yesterday, I backed into a fire hydrant. Scraped the side of our bumper and the edge of the wheel well. Bright yellow fire hydrant. “Hey, you got fire hydrant on my Chevy!” “You got Chevy on my fire hydrant!”
