Three months from now, our place will be ready.
Actually, it’s probably going to be ready before that as long as things keep moving at the steady clip they have been thus far, but even if that is the case, we still won’t be moving in on Day One because July is a busy month for us and we’d rather take our time transitioning from our current digs to our new digs so that when we get there, everything is in place and we can just start living.
This is one of the many lessons learned over years of moving house and doing more than a few “same city” swaps. It’s not always possible, but if you can carry your two addresses for a month, do it because it affords you the opportunity to (1) clean the new place before you get in and (2) move a lot of things in manageable carloads that lessen the amount of time you need to rent or borrow a truck, which is a plus.
These are the kinds of things I tend to think about at this stage of the game – the advance-planning, what do we need to change up to make this work better type stuff that you’re not going to consider once you start getting caught up in “New House Fever” or “We Need to Pack Syndrome” closer to your closing date.
Now is generally the time when I start figuring out some of the changes we need to make to our original plans as well. It’s a little different when you’re just moving into a rental space or don’t have multiple months to consider these things as your deal closes, but even under those conditions, you should still take a little time – like an evening with good food and your beverage of choice – to sit down and talk through some of the “You know, I’m not sure” elements of your impending move.
For instance, I’m not sure our guest bedroom is going to be big enough to serve as both a guest bedroom and a space for my wife the way I do the other spare room, which will become my office/den/hideout/where I keep all my Funko Pop! figures.
It felt a little tight when we did the walk-through a couple weeks back and that was before the drywall went up, so over the last couple weeks, we’ve been kicking around “kill two birds with one stone” ideas to make the space function the way we envisioned.
We had a minute or two where we thought, “Screw it – let’s just make it your space and guests can sleep on the pull-out in the living room” because that’s how it works now and is the set-up we had prior to leaving Victoria, but we didn’t have a third bedroom then. We do now and so there is no reason to leave our guests sleeping in the living room when we can find other solutions.
While our outside the box idea is to look at using some of our ridiculously huge garage as an office/den/hideout for me, the more practical avenue we’re considering is a Murphy Bed setup that includes a desk.
Murphy beds have come a long way since being the sad, depressing additions to studio apartments and run-down bachelor pads where divorcees landed following their break-ups, which is how I always thought of them because that’s how they were portrayed in movies. Now, they’re stylish and functional with storage and shelving and desks and whatever you might need them to be when they’re not being a bed.
Like I said – two birds, one stone.
These are the kinds of pivots you have to be ready to make as you’re moving into a new place because everything isn’t going to fit.
Outlets are going to be in the wrong spots. The furniture is only going to fit one way. The picture you had in your mind when you first envisioned where everything was going to go is going to need to be erased and drawn again a couple times before you arrive at something that actually works for the space and stuff that you have.
And you should think of these things and start figuring out alternatives now because moving is stressful enough without the emergence of new worries about where everything is going to go.
