Saying Goodbye to the Old House

I've had a pretty insanely busy month. We closed on a house, I quit my job, and we went to Chicago for a week. Then, as soon as we got back, I was scrounging up freelance work and painting the living room, kitchen, and dining room of the new house. That took me a week and then some, and I was there until 2 am many nights. About a week later, we started moving in. Though we hired movers for the furniture, the move was its own special kind of hell, and it took us a week to get completely moved out of the rental house we'd lived in since December 2010.

As I finally — finally! — loaded the last of our stuff into my car, I started to get a little sad. I wasn't attached to the house so much as the memories that we created in it. It's the first place Kyle and I picked out together, it's where we lived when we got engaged, and where we lived when we got married. It's where we hosted our first Christmas for both of our families, and countless cookouts, dinner parties, and accidental dance parties with friends. It's where just the two of us had a drunken pots-and-pans jamboree on Kyle's thirty-somethingth birthday, and where I woke up the next morning to find my underwear on the stove. It's where we lived when we loved each other so much we couldn't stand it, and where we lived when we wanted to strangle each other.

Plus, it's just a cool old house. So, I decided to document some of what I will miss, like the old door handles that I'm pretty sure date back to when the house was built in 1913.

The remnants of beautiful wallpaper in the two (tiny) upstairs closets.

The old heating vents.

The sunroom off of the master bedroom I didn't use often enough (or really at all, for anything other than storage, sadly).

The farmhouse sink in the kitchen — a kitchen that was open to the dining room.

And the exposed brick flue, that I know also exists in our new old house. I just need to expose it.

Of course, in addition to the tiny closets, there are other things I won't miss, like the bathroom floor that was impossible to keep clean. No combination of Bon Ami, Mrs. Meyer's, and elbow grease could brighten those once-white tiles.

Speaking of the bathroom, it was a construction site for the last year or so. (And while I'm complaining about the bathroom, I am thrilled that we will have more than one in the new house. Not only will Kyle and I not have to wait for the other to be done in the bathroom every morning, I can have a guest bathroom that I keep clean and nice, and a private bathroom that I will try to keep clean and nice but I know will get trashed with dirty clothes and toothpaste splatters on the mirror from time to time.)

I also won't miss the fact that while the house had central air and heat, the second floor was a swamp in the summer time (requiring a window unit to stay cool at night) and freezing in the winter (so we had to use a space heater on the coldest nights). The old, possibly original, single-paned windows also made for shockingly-high utility bills.

Overall, it was a wonderful place for us to live for two-and-a-half years. I'm glad I was able to snap a few pictures before I left for good, and I'm so excited to make memories, messes, and eventually a couple of babies in the new house.

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My Sad Sack Lunch

I've impressed myself with my dedication to packing lunches since beginning this project. Sometimes it's leftovers, but most days, I'm able to put together a salad with vegetables from my garden and CSA, and I've even started making big batches of dressing so I can pour a daily serving into a tiny mason jar. It's frugal, healthy, and if I wanted to, I could totally be self-righteous about my local vegetables (I'm not).

But this week, well, I'm just bad at it. There's a lot going on, and I'm not getting a lot of sleep. I was half an hour late to work yesterday. Last night I was up until 1 am working on a freelance article about old barns. We're supposed to close on the house tomorrow (even though I still have a hard time believing that the bank won't pull the plug in the next 24 hours). Oh, and we leave for Chicago Thursday. There are other things going on, too, but I don't have the energy to write about them just yet.

The point is that even though I didn't really prepare a lunch yesterday, I managed to at least stuff what was left of a grilled tri-tip into a sandwich bag. Meat is good for one's brain, so that's something. And who couldn't use more protein? For a minute, I pretended I was going to stick to a strict paleo diet after that steak, but when a bag of M&M's pretty much magically appeared on my desk, that was over.

I'm not complaining about eating a delicious steak. Especially because I didn't pack any lunch today. I have three dollars in my pocket, and I'm going to find a way to turn that into lunch. Stay tuned...

Garage Sale Day

Today is the neighborhood garage sale. About a month ago, when the neighbors decided on the date, I thought it would be perfect timing — I hoped we'd be close to done packing up the house, we'd have the basement and the garage completely cleared out, and we'd have a ton of stuff to sell. In my head, I'd already spent the money on paint for the new house. Um, nope.

Since the mortgage process has been consuming me, I've really just managed to mess up the entire current house by pulling everything out of its home, and all without putting a single item in a box. While I'm pretty proud of the inventory I managed to throw together in just a couple hours on Thursday night, there's still so much more I want purge.

I've always had a lot of stuff: books, vintage Pyrex, clothes, shoes, purses, dishes, knick-knacks, three sets of flatware. Hell, we even have four sets of coasters for one coffee table. You'd think that having lived in 11 places over the last 13 years would have forced me to downsize. But with every move, I felt like I got rid of at least 25% of my belongings. Unfortunately, my stuff problem is a lot like my weight problem — I work really hard to get rid of it, then before I know it, I have just as much as I started with, and sometimes more. It's probably a management issue. I don't have good habits, so I eat too much at dinner without exercising enough the next morning, and I bring too much into the house without getting rid of old things to make room. Then, I crash diet and crash purge. Oh, and then there's the crash opening six months worth of mail thing (though I recently found a year-old check for $100, more on that later!).

To make matters worse, hoarding is in my blood. On both sides. I hold onto things because they have sentimental value, or for perfectly practical reasons (you never know when that expensive sunscreen that totally irritates my skin will come in handy, right?). A lot of stuff stays because I don't want to hurt the feelings of the person who gave it to me. And when you're a person with a lot of stuff, people want to give you more stuff.

I'm slowly losing that sense of sentimentality, though, and I think it's a good thing.

Now that we're (hopefully) moving into a house that will be ours — ours for as long as we want it to be ours — I just don't want to be surrounded by so much stuff. While I think my home will always be a little messy, it doesn't have to be so cluttered.

Over the next few weeks, I'm going to try to get rid of at least two times more stuff than I put out for today's garage sale. I'm sure I'll always hold onto the box of my Grandma Ruth's costume jewelry, and my Grandma Freda's wacky shoes. But before I put anything else in a box or bag meant for the new house, I'll ask myself "Do you use this?" If the answer is "no," the next question will be, "Do you love it?" If the answer to that is "no," I should just get rid of it. However, taking this project into consideration, I should probably also ask myself, "Do you think you'll need this, or something like it, within the next year?" If I can't answer "yes" to at least one of those questions, it should go.

Honestly, for as much as I hold onto things, I've never missed anything I've sold or given away (save for a few cute vintage dresses I now see on my cute friends). If I can get another garage sale together, I might as well make back at least some of the money I wasted on all of that stuff I didn't even need in the first place. If not, Goodwill is good enough for me.

As far as this garage sale goes, everyone in the neighborhood thought everyone else was going to put signs up on the main streets, so we're not getting much traffic. Since I promised Kyle none of this stuff would go back in the house or garage, I might be making a trip to Goodwill sooner than later.

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