Its Official – We’re Moved!

Last night we took the final step of moving.  We closed out the lease on our apartment and turned in the keys.  What a great feeling it was!

We still have some unpacking to do at our house.  But we’re almost finished, once again mostly due to Winnie’s enthusiasm.  All things considering, we’ve done pretty well.  In just three weeks we cleaned and completely painted our new house, made some minor repairs, packed and moved 6000 pounds of “stuff,” while still working at our full-time jobs.

Oh, and we also had a bit of time for sleeping and eating.

Saturday we had the final pieces of furniture moved. These were the pieces of furniture that we decided were just too big and too heavy to drag down three flights of apartment steps and back into our house by ourselves.  So I located a local movers & haulers service through Craig’s List and scheduled them to come by.  It was well worth it.  They had seven large items including our couch, bookcases, and queen-sized mattress set moved in an hour and a half.

I stopped by the apartment manager’s office afterwards and signed out the papers.  We had to pay a penalty fee for breaking our one-year lease after five months, which I knew about and had planned for.  But the actual amount of the fee became a point of contention Saturday.  It seems that after we signed the lease back in October the apartment management company raised the fee.  The front desk people expected they should charge us the higher fee, not the fee in effect when we signed.  Not a problem I can’t handle other than I had to wait until Monday to chat with the head office.

Besides turning in the keys, the final item was moving my boat “Sea Dreams.”  Part of the attraction of living in this particular apartment complex was that they allowed boat and trailer storage, which saved us storage fees.  We’ve been using the utility trailer to move, but I wanted to wait until we had finished before pulling out the boat.  Sea Dreams will be sitting in our narrow driveway for at least the time being, and I didn’t want the driveway blocked while we still had other things to move.

It did feel good pulling “Sea Dreams” out of the apartment complex for the last time.  Backing her into the driveway at our house was a bit tricky, as it involves making a right angle turn from a relatively narrow road onto a narrow one-car drive.  The mailbox is on one side of the driveway, the cable TV junction box is a little ways over on the other side so there isn’t much room for “errors.”  I deliberately planned this event for late at night, after picking Winnie up from work.  I just didn’t want the neighbors as an audience for my first try backing the boat in – I’ll be living with the neighbors for a long time to come…

It’s been interesting unpacking.  Winnie had packed most of our collectables and small items back in Mississippi while I was at work.  I never really had much chance to see how she packed until now.  I have to admit to being impressed.  She used a wide variety of materials to wrap our breakables in including pot holders, towels, throw pillows, bits of clothing, and even drapes.  She also used a LOT of packing tape.  It seemed to have worked well; so far nothing has come up broken.  Pretty amazing considering the way it was all hauled up here and then stored in our apartment’s spare bedroom.

All-in-all, being moved in feels good.  I think Winnie is happy with our new home.  She certainly has a lot of ideas for redecorating and “home improvement” projects!

For myself; I can honestly say this is the first time since Hurricane Katrina that I actually feel that I have a home.