A Few Notes On Moving Into Your Very Own House

1. If you are at all interested in marital harmony, don't buy a house. These past two weeks have seen some spectacular fights. Fights which our neighbors may have heard, fights which resulted in throwing packs of Post-It Notes at each others’ heads, fights where many unpleasant names were called, fights during which each of us proposed the idea of divorce and the other one pointed out that we have to stay here, we own this goddamned house now and anyway neither of us has anywhere else to go.

2. When you have been stuffed into dorm rooms and apartments since the age of 18, and then spent the past nine months crammed into one room at your parents' house, it's really nice to have several days before your stuff arrives at your house so you can enjoy all that space.

3. When your closing has been pushed back a week and you are not 100% sure until the day before that you are actually going to close this time, the gas company is not sympathetic to your plight and will not give you an emergency appointment so you can have heat over the weekend. Not even if you beg. So we spent our first several days as homeowners still sleeping at my husband's frat house rental place.

4. After the above-mentioned fights about your new home, it is very nice to have a separate bedroom for your baby so you and your spouse can have make-up sex (and make-up-for-lost-time sex; he was gone for THREE MONTHS, people) and not have to be totally silent about it.

5. If you are going to have to stay in temporary lodgings until you get into your house, it is nice if they are only two miles down the road from said house. This may, however, inspire a certain laissez-faire attitude in your husband concerning the moving of your belongings from the temporary house to the permanent one. Most of our stuff was moved in the ReloCube, but there was the carload Max brought with him when he moved here in January (his computer, clothes, etc) and the carload that came down with us (a suitcase of our clothing, baby toys, our mattress, various odds and ends). Since we were in the temporary house over a week longer than planned, our stuff had time to spread out and scatter. I wanted to pack our car as full as possible each time we ran between the temp house and the new one; instead Max preferred to throw, say, a bath towel and two t-shirts into the back seat and call that a load. This made me crazy and led to a couple of the above-mentioned fights.

6. This close proximity of houses may also cause you to leave your cats in the basement of the old house for probably much longer than you should, while you attempt to unpack at your new abode and feel like a horrible person for enjoying your nice new home as a pet-free place. This enjoyment of a pet-free lifestyle may in fact cause you to realize that while you love your pets, you will probably not get any more once these are gone. You may also feel a twinge of despair when you calculate that this will probably not happen until your daughter is in high school. Then you will feel like an even more horrible person.

7. I cannot recommend ABF U-Pack enough. They are cheap, reliable, and extremely accommodating. They showed up exactly when they said they would, they were great about letting us have the container two extra days and then holding it for us until we called for it. Everyone on their staff was friendly and able to answer all my questions whenever I called. I will say, however, that the driver who dropped off the ReloCube warned me to pad and pack everything really well because “these things ride pretty rough.” He was NOT kidding. When the cube arrived, there was a big scratch mark down one side of it (not through it, though, it didn’t pierce the hull so our stuff was untouched). I think had I not resorted to stuffing clothing into the cracks between boxes, there would’ve been a lot more shifting going on during transit. As it was, the heavy round base for our living-room lamp was floating around in there unsecured, and it came out pretty banged up. Some screws and most of the little pins for our other lamps went missing, since I didn’t think to tape them into place. But that’s it. So on the whole, missing the clickers and a couple tiny (and replaceable) screws for some $10 Target lamps isn’t that bad.