Move It!

Oh my! Our house officially goes on the market this Thursday. What a drama it's been getting it ready for the big day. We just had the exterior painted and the roof replaced. Interestingly, neither had anything to do with selling the house. We decided to have the house painted back in April, months before selling had even occurred to us. The painters couldn't get to us until August, however! We already replaced the roof a few years ago, but it was damaged in a hail storm this past spring and, thus, had to be replaced again. 

We also had the horrible mishmash of shrubs out front removed and replaced with mountain laurel. Again, another project that had nothing to do with preparing the house for sale but turned out to come in handy. I really wanted to have blue hydrangea out front, but we have lots of deer in the neighborhood, and blue hydrangea is a popular menu item with them. 

Ugly Old Bushes and Ugly Blue Shutters

Cute New Bushes and Lovely Red Shutters

Of course, Cape Cod -- to me anyway -- is the hydrangea capital of the world. I'm excited about being there even though it won't be during hydrangea season. Boo!

A Cape Cod House with Cape Cod Hydrangeas

This is the second big move of my life. The first big move was 9 years ago when we left Haddonfield for here. At the time, I had lived in that house for 23 years, which was filled with 23 years of happy memories but also harbored 23 years of accumulated junk. We had 2 yard sales there and 1 yard sale here to get rid of everything that people were willing to buy. As for the rest, bits and pieces either lined the park strip in front of our house for trash collection for an untold number of weeks or was carted -- an equally untold number of times -- to Goodwill for donation. The Haddonfield basement was unfinished, but I just couldn't get over how much useless stuff had been stored down there for so many years for no justifiable reason.

Haddonfield House

We bought a ranch home because, while living in our 2-story Haddonfield home, I had undergone a major surgery, which prevented me from being able to climb stairs and sleep in my own bed for a few months. Of our current, "forever" home, I declared that I would never leave unless it was in handcuffs or a pine box. I was here to stay -- well, for 9 years anyway.  

Did I learn my lesson about "stuff" when we moved here? Did I avoid accumulating years of unnecessary stuff? Of course not! We don't have a basement here or an attic that is storage friendly. However, we do have a two-car garage. Do we park in that garage? No. Have we ever parked in that garage? No. Why? Because we "store" things there. When we moved in, Jim built shelves along one of the walls for that purpose. 

Jim the Builder

Despite Jim's hard work, our items requiring "storage" quickly exceeded the shelf space until our garage looked like it belongs to hoarders.

Two-Car Garage Turned Hoarder's Hovel
(Note Path Leading to Entrance to Inside of House) 

To prepare for an interim move has been worse than packing up 23 years of life in Haddonfield. It seems to have made no difference that, when Jim and I left Haddonfield, Christina was all grown up and married, which granted us the luxury of giving her custody of everything of hers that I had saved over the years. Every time we went to visit her and Lou and the children, we took a box of stuff, which promptly went into her own basement, until we had no boxes marked "Christina" left. Yet, the absence of "Christina" boxes has not made this move any easier.

Rather than the standard 3 categories dubbed "Trash," "Goodwill," and "Keep," we have 2 additional categories: "Cape Cod" and "Storage." Because the Cape house is furnished, and our residence there will be temporary, we aren't taking everything we own with us. Therefore, we have rented a local storage unit. We make almost daily trips to the storage unit, as well as Goodwill. We've donated a lot of stuff to Goodwill and moved a lot more to the storage unit -- SO FAR -- but we still have a way to go. 

 

Does This Look Like the Garage?

As we drove from Goodwill to the storage unit, I lamented that we were repeating history and suggested that, once we're settled in our next "forever" home, we should spend a week every year, pretending that we're selling our house and moving to another location, and get rid of stuff. Before he could share his opinion on the subject, I followed up with "That'll never happen."