excited about the move!

I'm gonna be all over the place on this post. Enjoy the randomness.

The house went on the market on Tuesday. We've had a lot of first showings, and a couple of second showing with strong interest. There will be an open house on Sunday. It would be oh-so-wonderful if the sale goes quickly and smoothly, but I suppose that's what all sellers want.

I've done to-scale layouts for each of the rooms in my new place. Of course, I know that it always looks like you have more space between furniture and walls than it appears in real life, so I'm sure I'll have to do some last minute changes. Nonetheless, I feel quite prepared for this move in terms of where everything will go.

master bedroom

This morning I got up so I could be at Home Depot by 6 am to rent a flatbed truck. I bought a reclaimed barnwood king size bed off of craigslist and needed a way to get it to my house. Home Depot to the rescue. Thankfully the guy I bought it from helped me load it. When I got to my house, I did have a plan to ask a neighbor to help (gasp! ASK for help?! that's absurd!) if I couldn't do it on my own, but I was able to get the whole thing unloaded and moved into the garage all by myself, as Avery would say. I was rather pleased with myself. And now I will have a real bed. I decided that my bedroom is going to be my housewarming gift to myself. I want it to be a cozy little den for myself. And I wanted a real bed for it damn it.

picture from craigslist posting

Also going in the bedroom are the pedestal table, the green chair from my office, and the side table from the dining room. The side table will be repurposed as my makeup application  station (bathroom upstairs is not the right space to sit down for this and I must sit down while doing it). The pedestal table will become my nightstand. The chair will remain a chair. 

selling 

To the list of good furniture that I will need to sell, I've added my office desk. I love this desk and it's still in great shape (with a few scratches here and there that I'm sure would be easy to repair). However, it is large. And I decided that I'd rather make the downstairs room into a guest room / organized storage space rather than an office. It'll be a change, but once I made this decision the space felt so much better in my head. Anyone need a big desk? I'll list it on craigslist, along with our dining room set, soon. It's a balancing act between finding a seller and keeping it in the house until mid-June. Whatever. It'll work out.

blurry picture of the desk from our current house listing

living room / dining room

Since the downstairs will now be a guest room, I will be able to repurpose my office hutch to be a place to cram stuff that tends to congregate in the main living area. I'm thinking like a place to put Avery's school bag and her art that comes home that I haven't sorted through yet. Things like that. I will have plenty of storage for the stuff currently housed in the hutch in the basement, so I plan to keep it as empty as I can, then purge it of the inevitable stuff that will pile up every x months.

hutch that I'll put in the living room of my new place 

I was ecstatic (it's the little things, isn't it?) when I realized I could fit my apothecary cabinet on a small section of wall immediately to the right of the front door entrance. I like the cabinet and it actually be quite useful storage for small things that would normally go into a junk drawer. There are very few drawers in the kitchen so can't allott one to be a junk drawer. But then where do you put rubberbands and the like? In the antique apothecary cabinet!

2007 picture of the apothecary cabinet

The sectional will fit, I believe, quite nicely in my new living room. It's large, but the new living room dimensions aren't that far off the current living room. Two single seater sections of the sectional I'll put into my storage space, so I'll end up with a square sectional.
I'm planning to put my computer in the least conspicuous corner of the living room, and one that is wasted space otherwise. I can't put one side of the sectional flush against the wall because of the radiator, so I need to leave a gap. I am just going to increase that gap to three feet and put a little table in that corner. I think it's going to be tough to find a table 2' x 3' (or close enough) based on my online searches, so it might be a while. Any suggestions for a DIY solution for a table there are welcomed, especially if you DIY it for me. :)

Avery's room

I'll need to get rid of her dresser and craft table, but the bed, both cubbies, and her 2x4 IKEA expedit can come. I'm going to remove the doors from the closet in her room and put a couple of my Elfa shelving units (like below) on the sides of the closet for drawers. I hang all her clothes, so she only needs drawers for jammies, socks, etc.

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Obviously I'm quite excited about this move. It makes me so happy to think about it. Just the thought of getting out of such a big house is so comforting to me. I just feel such a huge weight with the amount of space to upkeep and the necessary maintenance on a large house. 

In other news, I finished the Salesforce.com project for World Pulse, the non-profit I connected with through the anonymous commenter (thank you! are you the same anonymous as this anon commenter here?). I am more confident in my ability and interest to take the path to becoming certified as a Salesforce Admin. It feels good to have a direction that doesn't feel like trying to fit a round peg in a square hole. 

I've had frequent moments in the past few months where I'll finally make a decision about something - big or small - and it will have the round peg/square hole sensation. Like I was pushing and pushing when I needed to change something before I pushed. I don't know if that's a function of the fact that I have so many changes going on that I have to adapt, or if it's a different way of being for me (being more willing to change). 

Avery is ecstatic right now. She's in Nain's back patio area making a giant dirty mess after they planted seeds together earlier. She is one happy chickadee at the moment.