Move-In Misery

On Wednesday, the movers arrived and in a short 2.5 hours moved all of our furniture and "big stuff" into our new home. Unfortunately, the house wasn't quite ready for that.

We know our contractor worked really hard to get the basics ready for our move-in, but we were still pretty disappointed with how our first couple of days went down. Obviously, we expected some cosmetic issues; not everything was going to be perfect. Lack of hot water, electricity, and a condition that wasn't exactly "broom clean" contributed to the feeling of something like camping, and yet somehow worse.

By the time the movers left, our meager living space was crowded and dirty. It was so packed, we had to ask the movers to leave the sofa sections upright, to take up less floor space (pictured, above right).

In the days since, we've been methodically fixing this. Starting with the Guest Bedroom, we cleaned the floor section by section, unpacking and cleaning items and slowly carving out some space for ourselves. It reminded me of the kind of house-by-house sweep they run in Iraq, us freeing up and wiping down literally 3'x3' squares of floor at a time. Jamie made huge progress on the office and studio, including getting TV and Internets up and running. Over the weekend we've managed to clean almost all of the bedroom floors. We now basically have a usable living room and office, though still surrounded by boxes and miscellaneous items.

The strategy now is to keep the workers out of this half of the house (except to finish the bathroom) and let them back in to do room-by-room fixes once we have the full upper floor at our disposal, weeks from now.

Coming up this week, we'll clean out the hallway and tidy up the storage area (future half-bath) so we can move most of our boxes out of the living space. On the construction side, the new exterior walls on the lower floor should be framed, and our new doors and windows may go into the dining room! Should be some exciting pics to come.