An Ending and a Beginning

It's been a rough few weeks.

We moved out of our first home this weekend after spending the last few weeks surrounded by mounds of cardboard, bubble wrap, and free local newspapers that we pinched to use as packing material. My fingers were permanently stained with black ink rubbed from the pages of the Canadian Tire flyers and were permanently chapped from being exfoliated with pieces of packing tape.

We stayed up aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaallllll night on Friday night packing the last few boxes. The last few are always the hardest, because they are the ones full of the random stuff you've been ignoring for weeks because you don't know what to do with them. I mean, how do you pack a bouquet of sugar flowers or a canoe paddle? At 3:30 in the morning, the witching hour, these questions can be difficult to answer.

On Saturday morning the movers arrived armed with... nothing. They had nothing to pack us into a storage locker for any length of time, nor were they prepared to pack us to move once our stuff came out of storage. We had plans, people, and they were rapidly being deconstructed. Our original plan was to be all packed and moved into our storage locker on Saturday. On Sunday we would drive to my mom's place to drop stuff off, and then drive to BG's mom's place to drop even more stuff off (we have a lot of stuff.) Then we'd relax.

The revised schedule became: Movers arrive, movers leave empty handed. Val drives to airport to pick up sister. Movers return with packing supplies after an angry BG calls and swears at the manager. Furniture is wrapped and prepped. Val, Karen, and BG drive to BG's mom's place to drop some things off. Stop at Dairy Queen. Drive home, have dinner, fall unconscious. Sunday morning: Movers return, start moving furniture. Spend 45 minutes trying to get bedroom dresser down the stairs. Lower bed box spring over side of house to get it down. Val drives Karen back to the airport. Stuff gets moved into locker which is way smaller than we paid for and has holes in the wall. Val and BG drive two hours to Val's mom's place, drive back, go to lawyer's to sign papers that were supposed to be signed LAST week for house closing but were lost by lawyer's assistant. Crash.

But -- it's done.

We're homeless. Emotionally, leaving the house was hard. We spent our time in the van on the way home reminiscing about all of the great things we have experienced in the first house we ever owned. We loved evenings on the rooftop patio with a bottle of wine. We loved eating dinner with friends and hanging out on the couch. We loved "fondue nights", Thanksgiving dinners with family, and baking Christmas cookies. We loved sleeping in on Saturday mornings or staying up late on Saturday nights. We loved our giant two-person bathtub. We adored coming home every night to our house. Our little cramped townhouse drove us crazy, but it was ours and we loved it. And now it belongs to another couple, and it's going to be as great for them as it was for us -- I just know it.