The last few months have been so nonstop.
Like, I thought the homebuying process itself was stressful and time consuming, with the back-and-forth, scheduling all the appointments, waiting to hear about our loan approval.
And I didn’t even do most of that; Ryan did.
But the actual moving in part has been so much more stressful and time consuming.
Ryan and I officially moved out of our apartment last Thanksgiving weekend to fully move into our new townhouse.
Is this a 700-word post full of bitching and moaning? Maybe.
To recap: We closed on our townhouse in the first week of October. We had a 60-day overlap where we had to give move-out notice at our apartment, so we used those 60 days to spruce up the townhome a bit. It needs a loooottt of work!
Ryan scraped down popcorn ceilings, refinished the garage, removed a few walls, closed up a few walls, ripped out kitchen cabinets, replaced warped studs, and mediated mold damage in several walls… the list goes on.
He also ordered in a few contractors to handle work we didn’t feel comfortable doing — or didn’t have time to do — ourselves, like replumbing our gas lines so we could hook a gas stove up in our kitchen, skim coating and retexturing ALL of our walls, and cleaning and inspecting our fireplace.
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His priority during those 60 days was to tackle the work that would be really annoying to do while we were living here.
Like… can you imagine skim coating an entire house while living in it? No thanks.
While Ryan was doing and coordinating all of this, I was packing up most of the apartment and handling a lot of administrative work: Transferring electric service, establishing internet service, picking out new appliances, cleaning… you know.
It was a lot in 60 days!
And because this house needs sooooo much work, of course we weren’t able to get the place fully move-in ready when we moved in.
To be fair, we knew that going in. We’ve known from the start that it’s going to take at least two to three years to get to where we want to be.
So now, we’re at a bit of a weird in-between stage. We spent the first month at the new house with all of our belongings boxed up and stored in between our garage, our master bedroom and our second bedroom.
Ryan set up a temporary bedroom in the lofted area above our living room, which will eventually be our library/ office.
(We’re calling it the “loftice.”)
Offff course, because our bedroom has no walls and is located right above the living room and right next to our temporary kitchen, we’re both living on the same sleep-deprived schedule.
When I wake up at 4:45 a.m. for yoga or spin class, Ryan also wakes up at 4:45 a.m. for yoga or spin class.. And when Ryan stays up late to watch Sunday Night Football… I also stay up late to watch Sunday Night Football.
It’s all temporary, we’re living and adjusting.
At least all our stuff is finally inside, as of a week or two ago. Many of our boxes were in the garage for a good few weeks until we were slowly able to shuffle some stuff around, unpack our living room, and move all of those boxes into the master bedroom and second bedroom so Ryan could use the garage as a workspace.
Storage issues aside, the biggest challenge has definitely been living without a functional kitchen.
We made the decision to completely gut and redesign our kitchen. We ripped out all the cabinets, countertops and soffits. We moved the refrigerator, sink and dishwasher (and replumbed) and completely reconfigured the layout. We rewired to add new lights and outlets, moved some vents around and closed up a wall. It took us a few weeks to settle on the layout and design, and then a few more weeks to wait for the cabinets to be delivered. Then it was a few days of cabinet installations, then appliance installation — and now we’re in the two-week waiting period for our countertop installation.
During this time, we’ve had boxes of kitchen stuff (dishes, wares, small appliances) both stored in those boxes in our bedrooms and laid out on folding tables so we could still cook and eat.
We used our dining table in our kitchen for a bit until we had to move everything out of the kitchen to make room for cabinet installation.
Then, we moved our “kitchen” into our dining room during cabinet installation. This is where we’re at right now. The hardest part has been not having a kitchen sink. We’re washing small dishes in our bathroom sinks. If we get desperate, we use the bathtub… but since we’re trying to avoid dumping kitchen grease and food remnants into our bathroom plumbing system, I’ve been taking my collapsible orange camping sink into my office every other day to wash pots, pans, cutting boards, etc.
However, all this is better than the first week we lived here, where we were basically warming up premade containers of soup on an induction burner anywhere there was an open outlet.
I’ve made so many slow cooker and air fryer meals over the past few weeks, y’all.
We’ve also gotten creative about how we do things other than cooking.
We have our coat closet set up in our downstairs half-bathroom. Our bathroom drawers are in our hallway, our pantry storage has been repurposed as bathroom storage, we’re using nails as towel racks…
…we’re thinking outside the box over here.
At one point, Ryan had ripped all the clothing rods down in all the closets. Luckily I convinced him to find one and put one back up (after I hung my clothes over the TV to make a point) so now I do have a closet I can use for the few pieces of clothing that aren’t still boxed up.
I really miss my full sweater collection.
And, one final complaint?
We get a soooo much mail addressed to all the previous tenants.
Hazyl Warford, please update your Shein shipping address. Erin Sloan, please set up USPS mail forwarding.
Wheewww. So, that’s where we’re at! Once we have our countertops delivered in two weeks, we should be able to move our kitchen out of our bedroom, and then move our bedroom out of our loftice, and then move our loftice out of our living room.
And, of course… I can cook again!
Let’s all hope I maintain my sanity until then.
