Give Away!

J. just scheduled a massive Salvation Army pickup - a dozen furniture and/or outdoor things leaving the house in a week.  Added to the stuff moved to storage this week and wow!  What a difference.

I look around and think 'we're never going to get all this done' - but we will.  Though I can already feel (sometimes) being on the brink of 'ready to be done'.  As in 'I'll pay a king's ransom to have people come here and finish 'cuz I'm done'.

I culled out my coffee mug 'collection' which will be part of our family lore forever.  Admittedly, I've acquired way too many - but we get them primarily when we travel and they are sentimental to me.  However!  Three full shelves of them - most of which out of reach of the shortest person in the house (me) - makes it pointless to have so many.

I (sort of) easily identified 13 I could do without.  Then I put back the ones we're keeping for the 'here and now' (before we move and while we are in this house and when we are in temp housing).  There was still a huge bunch of 'others' and most were sentimental and I didn't know how to start deciding.  J. said 'in the new house, we have plenty of room for all of them'.  I love him.  So now there's two boxes - one to donate and one to take to storage.

Next we're going through that same process for pots, pans, baking pans, etc. .  Plenty we can do without and while the new house has tons of storage, I'd rather not move a bunch of things we don't use very often.  One cupboard at a time -

We spent part of yesterday reseeding the rest of the back lawn - fingers crossed it does as well as the first reseeding we did - growing like gangbusters and looks really great!  Poor Chloe is confused because the existing grass is (mostly) covered with a bit of top soil so she's not sure where to go.  We're trying HARD to get her to go in the side yard along the fence but...sometimes she heads to the grass.

J. sent an email to our builder because honestly, it's been close to two months with very little movement forward on the house.  I sure hope we're still on track for October/November - because Christmas in a rental apartment is going to be really hard.

When we go up again in a couple weeks, we're going to rent an additional storage unit.  In some ways, I'm hoping we'll be able to only need one POD to house the things we would need right away - and the rest will be in storage.  It's hard to realize we will be moving three times - once from here, then from temp housing to the new house and then moving stuff to the house from two storage units.  Sounds exhausting - feels overwhelming. 

Tomorrow is a new day and every day is a day to just dig in.  I have lunch with my former former boss (not the boss I just left but the one before) and I'm driving to him (about 40 minutes away) since I'm retired and have more time than he does.  It will be a treat to see him -