Life Is Like A Box.... But Who Took The Chocolate And Left All This Junk?

Dining Room....a staging area for knick knacks.
My poor hutch and table are swallowed up in here and the table has the leaf in it!

"Violent exercise is like a cold shower; you think it does you good because you feel better when you stop." ~ Robert Quillen

I may have given the wrong impression with my post showing the formal living room in the new house with furniture and tables and even a flower arrangement in place. The rest of the house is basically in shambles. Well, not exactly "shambles".... (don't panic Stephen), but rather more of an out of control chaos..... and it is my fault, partly. When we closed on June 29th I had this wonderful, blissful plan. It started out ok with the dusting of the floors and the laying of the rugs. Then it went a bit awry!

First, the moving company held my furniture hostage longer than I expected. No problem, we will just start on vacating the 10 X 23 foot storage unit (see bottom picture). So I started with the Christmas items and boxes near the front and those wardrobe boxes; I could hang clothes in the closet without having furniture. This went well for a while, but then I started hitting the boxes with books.... lots and lots of books.... and these boxes started piling up in the new garage and suddenly it was full. So I stopped and started going through the boxes... these same boxes that only three years ago I had so carefully packed and labeled and weeded through before packing. I had had two garage sales and donated six boxes of perfectly good kids clothes to the local children's home and woman's shelter and six van loads to the charity thrift shop before moving, so you would think things would be in order... right? Oh! No! So garage sale boxes started and Ebay boxes started and boxes for Nyssa to sort through and trash....

Speaking of trash.... did you know that I just got the trash can from the city this week... the one I called for two weeks ago? So yes, I had to haul trash back to the old house, back to the storage unit trash bins and even one up to William and Mary, but not on purpose.

Anyway, I made a little progress and then hit the wall. No, really, I hit the wall in the storage unit... the wall of boxes, half way back that was stacked almost ten feet high; packed solid to the ceiling with these lovely boxes marked "Nyssa's books" on top that were heavy and the boxes clearly marked "CHINA - FRAGILE", stacked beneath them.. six rows beneath them. Even with a six foot ladder I am not going to get up there and... well, the knee I fell on is not so great and the other one is a bit crunchy. As I contemplated "two men and a truck" while my almost 80 year old father still insisted he could help.... Nyssa arrived to the rescue! She came and with her youthful enthusiasm, she dove right in on that wall and we started to see cracks. Of course we still had to go through the boxes and there still was no furniture and the garage was full to the brim.

The den... how most of the house really looks,
only worse... it is a staging area...well, for everything!

The three days before the furniture arrived, I worked hard to at least have space in the garage for the overflow of additional boxes as they came in. So, boxes had to go to the loft or the bedrooms where furniture was not going or... or.... just somewhere out of the garage. The den became a staging area and as I found kitchen boxes I unpacked them and .... you guessed it, began boxes for Nyssa to take to grad school. Merging two households and two that have such a propensity to collect kitchen gadgets is unbelievable. The grad school kitchen boxes mounted and it became obvious that the dream of not having a separate storage unit was for naught. The attic is not yet floored to our satisfaction and the walk in attic is too small for everything, not to mention the sixteen steps to the second floor and the pull down ladder up to the attic.... with my knees? Right! So a much smaller unit was procured, just a few blocks from the new house and.... just in time... there was space in the garage.

The old storage unit.....remember this picture!!!!!!

(To be continued.....the end for now)