And by it, I mean the move, and by finished, I mean mostly finished. Well, maybe somewhat finished. Well, there is a lot to do still.

But at least the new house is finished and ready to move in to. Well, how about mostly finished. Somewhat? Sort of? 🙂

Actually the house is for real for real mostly done. There is still some work to be done by the contractors but the essentials are all in. There are some lights, fixtures and other electrical work that needs to happen, and some minor plumbing, heating and other work to be done, but for instance I was able to take a shower today and the toilets work, and “tah” (what one of the kids used to call the TV) was able to be plugged in. There is no shower curtain but I just aimed towards the back wall of the tub. Well, let me correct myself – we have found the shower curtain, we just can’t find the shower curtain ROD. There are boxes and crap all over the house, but before I left for work today I was able to cordon off a safe zone for the TV and we will just keep unloading what we can. I expect by the weekend we should have things mostly in order.

So let’s recap the day yesterday, shall we? Around lunchtime I called up Time Warner to have them switch our high speed Internet over. Lady told me that the earliest they could have someone out was Sunday. So I said fine. Then I went online to Cincinnati Bell to also get the phone switched over. Expecting the same kind of leviathan performance, when they asked what day to change the service I put in the current day (since we were moving). Got an email about 20 minutes later saying our request had been “processed”. I called home and nothing. They had already put the service over to the new house. Where, of course, there was no actual telephone. Good times….

I went home a bit early and packed a few more things and then headed off to get the truck. That went fine and I got back home about 4:30. I started loading up the boxes and such. Got a call about 5:25 from a church friend who was at the new house (since that’s the address listed in the directory). I gave him directions and he was the first to arrive. Soon after Carolyn arrived with the pizza and then the folks started coming and we started loading.

I assumed my standard job of “Tetris-master” i.e. putting all the boxes and such in the van to optimize space. I think we lost a lot of space with some of our shelving units. I have about 10 5-shelf shelving units that were in the basement that I had taken up and put in the truck. My thinking was that we could just put the various bins and boxes on those shelves and we wouldn’t lose space. But we left a lot of space there I think because the boxes and bins that we put on those shelves were not the right sizes to fill every nook and cranny. That was another problem – we have a bunch of plastic storage bins that I got from a deal at Staples awhile back (about 30 of them for free). And I had gotten a lot of big Dell computer boxes from work. But we didn’t have very many smaller boxes. Normally when loading up a truck you can get a lot of those smaller boxes back in “Mom’s Attic” and further back in the truck to really save on space (kind of the pebbles and sand in that “big rocks first” parable). But we had lots of really BIG boxes and bins and that hurt us I think.

As we were getting towards the end someone brought up the dreaded “M” word. As in “multiple trips”. Moving very close by (as opposed to cross country) has advantages but also drawbacks. The advantage is that you can make multiple trips and even multiple car / van trips afterwards to pick up loose ends. The drawback is that you can afford to be more sloppy with your packing and loading and so typically one takes advantage of that (and we were no exception). In the end I thought that we could get it all to fit but we had a lot of people just sitting around as we tried to pack things so we decided to just go over with what we had and came back.

We unloaded the truck pretty quickly. I tried to direct where various boxes and stuff went but I have been since informed that I did not do that great a job. Plus we did have a few instances of “Ooh the basement? How about ummmm right here? :-)”

Another reason I didn’t want to make 2 trips is I was afraid of the bailage. We had about 20 people there originally and all but 6 left. The scouts had to go get swim-certified for their upcoming Scout Camp and a couple other people had appointments and such.

We loaded up a few of the bigger things. We had to take the doors off the fridge and then we got the deep freezer, washer and dryer as well. Then it was just tons of “junk”. I can not BELIEVE how much stuff we have!!!!! The problems on this load were 1) We knew we had tons of room (24′ truck) so we were a bit haphazard with getting stuff in there and 2) Most of the stuff that was left was awkwardly sized, like a kids’ rocking horse, or a basketball goal, or a lawnmower, etc.

Hauling some of that big stuff was really hard. When we got over we realized that the fridge, even with the doors off, was not going to fit in the kitchen via the front door. So we went around to the back door. Of course, first we had to wheel it on the dolly through the dirt that is my driveway / back yard. Oh, and then we had to unscrew the door stop that my contractor had put in the back door to prevent it from opening. Why would he do that, you might ask? Well, because the deck is not yet built and so the back door opens 3 feet off the ground :-). The 3′ made it fun to try and lift all that stuff into the house, but we got everything in. It’s all around the house in various boxes and bins, and even some of the boxes are not in the right place, but it is all (most / some) in.

I want to give a big thank you to all the people that came to help us move. Ralph, Scott, Brent, Aaron and Jake Blackwelder, Abby Doyle, Matt Foister, Kent Huxel, Scott Cottrell, Rob and April Hopkin, John, Mike and Bob Tensmeyer, Chuck Salzman and 2 boys I didn’t know but I assume were either his sons or other kids from the scout troop, Brandon Brooks, Aaron Olmsted, John Whatley, Tim Gross and hopefully I did not forget anybody? Thanks especially to Rob, April, John and Aaron who were in until the bitter end.