Tales of a Fulltime Mom: Moving, Moving, and Moving Some More

It kind of stinks when you're moving out but you have no place to move into. That was pretty much how we felt last Sunday when we were forced to move the majority of our stuff into storage. With nothing resolved with our housing situation and tenants moving in at the end of the week, there was nowhere to go but Public Storage. Originally we had planned to pay movers to move everything but after getting a quote in the $1,100 range, I poo poohed that idea (easy for me to say since I wasn't carrying the big stuff!). Plus, it's not like we were going to pay movers twice. In the end, we had help from Duncan's brother, Russ, and David. Others had volunteered as well but we decided to save them for the next go round. Ron and Elaine took the kids for the day so that I could be free to help too. It was a long, tiring day but fortunately we had the reward of being in our brand new house. Oh wait, that's how it's SUPPOSED to happen. Instead, we had the pleasure of being on air mattresses in our eerily empty old house. Not quite as exciting.

The room empty except for their mattresses

Of course, I can't resist taking the sleeping picture

On Monday, Lowe's was scheduled to come and install the new carpet in the three bedrooms and our stairs (at the lovely price of $12/stair). But the rain from hurricane Isaac passing sortof by, delayed that. Instead, they came Tuesday. We got a darker, "busier" color so that hopefully any stains the tenants would make would be well hidden. With the house mostly empty and new carpet down, the kids had a grand time running between the girl's room and our room up and down the hall, doing somersaults on our air mattress as they passed by. I'm glad they were at least seeing some excitement in all this!

They dragged the left over carpet onto the porch and shared an applesauce cup.

Thursday was our "get out" day. With the tenants coming the next evening and the cleaning service coming the next morning, we had to completely clear out and head to Grandma and Grandpa's. Speaking of which, Ron and Elaine totally saved us in all of this, on many levels. They had come over on the Friday before our moving day on Sunday to clean out our garage and take many loads to storage. They took the kids on Sunday (no easy task, believe me) and then they were back on Thursday morning to help us move out the rest of our remaining stuff including our big TV, futon, etc, most of which ended up at their house. We could not have done this all without them, for sure. After the girls were in bed that evening and Brady was hanging out with Grandma because he refused to go to sleep, Duncan and I headed back to the house to do paint touch up, replace some blinds, clean the walls, etc. We obviously didn't plan too well in advance because we found that we had no white paint that matched the white in our upstairs hall so I ended up having to scrub off all the marks on the wall with some cleaning wipes. Very tedious, to say the least. We finally crawled into bed after midnight night only to be awake half the night thanks to Brady waking up several times. He eventually ended up with us but slept cross ways on the double bed. It was a tough night.

The next morning the kids and I met the "maid" who was to clean our house. It ended up being a guy so I'm not sure if they are still called maids or what. I was quoted an estimate of four to five hours of cleaning time. Around 1:30, after being on the job four hours, he calls me and says, in partial disgust, "Whoever lived here before didn't use the hood and oil sprayed all over the cupboards. It's going to take me several more hours to get them clean." Of course, I had to admit that the clown was me but honestly, I had no idea what he was talking about because the cupboards didn't seem dirty to me other than a your normal dirt on some white cupboards. I figured he must have some higher clean standards than I. Duncan got there soon after and instructed him to not spend so much time on that. Despite that, he was there all the way until 6:15. Talk about cutting it close. The new tenants arrived at 6:30. But yeah, it ended up taking nine hours to clean. I think I would die if I was cleaning that long.

While we waited for the "maid" to finish, we went next door to say good-bye to our friends Ruben and Rosana and their boys Robi and Ronnie.

I can't remember if I mentioned or not but our tenants are a nice little family of four with a 2-year old daughter and a 4-month old son. They are relocating from St. Augustine. We feel very happy that we're leaving our house in their good hands. It did feel strange handing over our remotes, keys, and myriad instructions. But we did and so ends that chapter of our lives. It was a good 7.5 years in that house. In the end, we mostly felt relief that we got everything done in time.

After our rough night with Brady on Thursday night, we decided that we would stay at Ron and Elaine's on Friday night but after that it was time to move on. Might as well leave while the bloom was still on the rose! But no, we found a 3-bedroom condo down near Sea World so we knew we could throw Brady in his own room and hopefully that would help him sleep better. Also, Brady is into anything and everything in Ron and Elaine's house and it's much better to keep him contained in a much smaller space. We went to church as usual and had lunch and then headed down here to the condo. It's a great place with a huge pool. We pretty much feel like we're on vacation. The latest is that we'll close on either Thursday or Friday so we have it booked through Thursday night.

Our condo.

Brady slept the night without a peep. This morning we went to a First Watch down in this neck of the woods. It's like a whole new world down here. We may be only 30 minutes south of where we lived but we just weren't down here much. Late morning we headed to Bonnet Creek resort, near Disney, where the Bergherms were staying for the weekend. The Isidros also came and we had a great day of hanging out at the multiple pools and eating. It's nice to have such great friends!