Tuesday, February 21, 2012

Merging Homes

The move went really well yesterday. I requested to work a halfday and have the afternoon off so I could help out some, but there was no one to cover the store for me so I had to work all day. I was stressed out about not being able to help, but it worked out just fine.

Dan had the day off from school (Presidents Day) and Chris had the day off work and Ruthie wasn’t watching the little girl she normally watches during the week, so it actually worked out for our schedules. Dan picked up the moving truck at 9am and they loaded Chris and Ruthie’s house into it. 2 friends of Chris and Ruthie helped out for a few hours. Around 11am I got a call from a lady in our small group at church. She asked if they’d like some help, so I gave her directions to the new house to help unload. Later I learned that she took her husband to help, too, and Dan and Chris said he was a huge help. Her husband has only met us once and doesn’t go to small group with us, so it was SUPER nice of him to help out! They helped for about 2 hours.

By about 4pm they had both our houses emptied into the new house and had returned the rental truck. I couldn’t believe they had gotten so much done! It took 2 trips for Chris and Ruthie’s house and 1 trip for our house, although they didn’t move any of our garage stuff. I picked up dinner for the 5 of us on my way home from work and we ate amongst boxes. After we ate Dan and I went back to our house to get a few random things. Chris and Ruthie’s house is completely empty except their cleaning stuff. Our house has some of our food and some random stuff here and there, but I think we can get it all over to the new house in 1 car load. We didn’t move any of our garage stuff – the new garage is pretty full of boxes that need to be taken into the house to be unloaded. Hopefully we can work on some of that tonight – we have to have our house empty and clean by Saturday morning. I’d like to get it done Thursday night so Dan can turn in keys on Friday.

The new house is great. There’s TONS of storage under thestairs, which will be really nice. I think we’ve agreed to all put our bulky jackets and stuff in that closet and we’ll fill the back portion (where all the storage room is) once we’ve unpacked our stuff. The pantry is HUGE! It’s great! It’s about 5 ft wide and has deep shelves from top to bottom. The kitchen has a lot of cabinets – we unpacked a lot of the kitchen last night and still had a lot of empty space in there even with some doubles of things, so that was encouraging. Our closet in our bedroom is smaller than our previous closet, but we didn’t have the old closet full at all so I think that will be fine. Our bedroom is a nice size and the bathroom is nice, too. Chris and Ruthie’s 2 rooms are really small, which makes me feel kind of bad, but they said they don’t mind at all. The formal dining room is quite large and we have Chris’ desk with computer set up in there right now. We’ll add more to that room as we unpack – we might even put our couch in there. The living room is a decent size and holds their nice corner couch really well. The gas fireplace puts out a nice amount of heat and the house holds the heat really well – we turned off the heater last night and the house was still toasty this morning when we got up. Unfortunately I think the ferrets are going to have to be kept in our bedroom, which I don’t like because they make noise at night (drinking their water and walking around and stuff), but we’ll get used to that. The only thing I would change about the house is the size of the 2 bedrooms that Chris and Ruthie have. Overall it’s a great house with some pretty decent storage. We are already glad that we got the ceiling storage thing for the garage – we may even get another one just to keep things from being piled on the floor. We stood on the back patio last night and instead of hearing trains we heard hundreds of frogs – it was REALLY neat! We decided we’d have to camp out in the backyard when the weather gets better.

Kenai has known something strange was about to happen. She was very clingy all weekend while Dan’s mom and our sister-in-law were in town (Dan was out of town with some guy friends for a guy’s weekend). She was in my lap every chance she got and was a lot more needy than usual. She was a little overstimulated last night and I think she was a little relieved when we went to our room and went to bed. Some friends brought over their 2 little kids at about 8:30pm and visited for a while last night. All 3 kids were running around amongst the boxes and yelling a lot, and Kenai was fine at first but you could tell she got a little uneasy – it was a lot of change at once and I imagine she’d been on edge all day. She’s at the vet today to be spayed. Dan dropped her off and said she was perfectly happy to go in with the vet tech. I imagine she got in the room with the tech and turned around and thought, “where’s my dad?!” We’ll be able to pick her up late this afternoon. We’ve got her crate all set up in our room so she can be contained and still and quiet for a few days.