A Packing To-Do List: a house log

Look how spiffy our house is looking these days:

With less than 5 days until the big move, we have learned that packing is no joke. But we have our eye on the prize (our exciting new digs) so we are trying to keep our spirits up, stay hydrated, and play some good music for dancing as we go (the dancing is for Clara- gotta keep the baby entertained or packing progress can screech to a halt). Oh and we got many of our “secondhand boxes” as we are lovingly calling them by trolling craigslist and freecycle (and even driving to a local reader’s house when she offered some up to us on Facebook). But admittedly we did have to grab a few from Walmart when we ran out of pre-used ones. Oh well, at least they are made from 100% recycled material and we can craigslist/freecycle them when we are done so they’ll live on like Leo’s memory in Titanic. Sidenote: anyone else still have a grade school crush on Leo?

Our to-do list is fairly nuts, but so far we have managed to cross these things off:

• remove every single item from the wall and patch/paint every nail hole in the house (this was in fact about 500 times easier than I expected- simply remove all the nails at once, spackle everything at once, and then paint room by room. It is a lot faster than doing those three things in each room before moving onto the next one since you’d be opening and closing the spackle and cleaning the putty knife about a million times).
• transfer all of our utilities so they start over at the new place on move-in day
• pack the whole bathroom (except for travel sized shampoo & conditioner, our toothbrushes, and the shower curtain)
• pack all of our frames, mirrors, books, ceramic animals, and 80% of the breakables (still need to do our dishware – yikes!)
• pack all of the clothes we will not be using in the next 7 days (we created a little “vacation stash” of everything from clothes to baby supplies and toiletries that we will appreciate having on hand instead of needing to unpack a million boxes to find those necessities).

As for what is still on the list, here is what we have on the agenda:

• pack the rest of the kitchen along with about 20% of the other rooms that still need to be done
• rake the yard so the new owners do not think they are moving into a giant leaf pile
• oversee the completion of a few random inspection items (some flue work is being done by a pro tomorrow)
• get our oil measured for closing (new buyers pay for the oil that is left in the tank, is not that a pleasant fair way to do it?)
• wave goodbye to our tan slipcovered Pottery Barn sofa in the den (someone from craigslist is supposed to be picking it up at 4)
• clean the oven and the fridge (cannot truly do this until right before we go)
• vacuum/sweep/scrub the house spotless before locking the door with a tear in my eye

Assuming all goes well, the new owners are supposed to be closing on our house on Monday morning and once those funds come through we can close on our new place on Monday afternoon. So for a few odd hours in the middle of the day we in fact will not be homeowners at all. Weird, right? This necessitates an airtight moving plan, which does not exactly sound straightforward but we are sure we will somehow get ‘er done. We are planning to move all of our stuff into a giant U-Haul by Sunday night and are paying to keep the truck overnight so it’ll essentially become a large storage locker on wheels until we can unpack it on Monday afternoon at the new house (where our alarm system will be getting installed at the same time). Should be interesting total chaos, especially since we are used to a few trips back and forth when it comes to a big move like this. Thankfully we have John’s excellent family helping with the loading and unloading. Did you think we’d hire movers? Come on, we are total low-cost-os. Besides, we enjoy a good Hands-on adventure. Here is hoping it has a glad ending and none of my ceramic animal friends have to die for the cause…