Moved : Part I

Ok. So I am a month behind.  

We did move.  It was a crazy few days but it happened.

I will highlight the move in bullet form:

• movers arrived to pack and decided to pack & load same day (5 days earlier than scheduled load date) with an understanding that our items were to remain on truck - no storage and to arrive Friday afternoon, our closing date. Arrangements were made & the house was filled with bodies & a lot of hustling on my part.  

•  Matt & kids spent this day at his battalion organizational day (annual family fun day through work) while I stayed home to deal with packers. 

•  what started out as a few hours worth of packing, so I could join the fun, quickly turned into 12 and no fun for me. But, things were moving & shaking & that was good! 

• the next few days were spent finishing up our packing (we pack ourselves mostly) and finalizing things on THREE properties: our rental clearing requirements, our new home in OK and our home in Belleville which fell under contract (yahoo!) the week we were moving (extra crazy!). 

• Matt was out straight with phone calls, paper work, and a million other things. 

• Wednesday we get a call from movers to remind us of a Thursday delivery. Umm. No Friday, we tell them. Turns out, the driver double booked & had to unload on Thursday. Long story short: Matt got mad (something he rarely does), made a few calls & we agreed to a Monday delivery with our items going into vaults with same company & not being re-packed (they have to unpack items to inventory them when moving to storage & then repack). Extra moving & packing of items is when the damage happens! 

• our move day fell on a Thursday. We picked up our Uhaul the night before and began loading Thursday morning. We also picked up our trailer rental for the motorcycle that day which was a 3 hour round trip - major dent in the day! 

• our 2-4 pm leave time stretched itself out to 9 pm.  We were tired. We were gross. And we were ready to GO! (Serious props to Matthew for completely loading truck, car, van, bike...everything -solo - he's my moving hero!)

• a quick math lesson: we had a 9 hour drive and a 9 am apt at our new property and it was 9 pm. That left us 3 hours to sleep, shower, make wrong tuns, eat (dinner hadn't happened yet & breakfast would be wanted at some point), have melt downs, coffee stops, ect.  We skipped a few things.  Like showers. 

• we did stop to sleep around 1 am. My foot (I have this one leg & foot that swells - its weird and anther story in itself) was the size of a watermelon (not kidding) and I knew I had to get it elevated. We checked in & fell into bed. Not one bag or item came in - just bodies. Alarm went off exactly 2 hrs. & 45 min later.  We took our dirty, still sleepy selves back to our vehicles & continued on. Entire stop (checkin & checkout) was 3 hours.  

• time was not on our side. We forged on. We made it to our final home walk-thru at 9:45am. Late but, hey, not bad considering! We pretty much noted that house was in fact still standing & drove to our closing that was scheduled for 10 am. We were not too late. But we looked...well...scary. 

• I wish I had video footage. I really do. Our arrival to the meeting was quite similar to the Beverly Hillbillies & Cali.  All kids were in pj's. Hair a mess, teeth unbrushed & just downright neglected. I, too, was supporting the pj party (and the neglected look). Matt had the decency to not wear his pj's (briefs) to the meeting & wore yesterday's work clothes. All eyes were on us. Eyes that were dressed for an office. Suits, ties, dresses, make up. Pretty lashes & jewelry. Heels, shinny shoes & pleasant aromas. Yea. Not us. 

• we met the sellers (I'm sure they were thrilled to meet us). And got down to business. Coffee & snacks were offered. We devoured all offers. Again, making us look more cave-man like. 

• thankfully, the embarrassment was not felt due to an extreme case of "I don't give a crap! I'm tired!".  I wasn't going out of my way to be friendly. I just wanted to be outta there! Perhaps not my finest hour. 

• we finished signing our lives away & headed to OUR home!!

• a home that had no electricity, water or any utility turned on.  It was hot. We were thirsty. And dirty. And wanted nothing more than a shower and a floor to lay on.

To be continued...