I apologize for my unscheduled 2 week hiatus. I never imagined moving into this house would be so much work. I mean, I guess I knew it would be a lot of work, but I thought I’d be able to handle it better.

Ever since I left for college, up until August of 2009, I moved every 4 months. Some were small moves like switching dorms, or coming home for the summer, some were much further away like moving to Europe for 4 months. In August of ’09 I finally settled down in my first apartment in Hershey, and stayed for 2 years. Then in Aug of ’11 I moved 20 minutes away to a townhouse in Linglestown and stayed for another 2 years. Now since we purchase a house in Middletown, hopefully we won’t have to move ever or at least not for a LONG time.

First apartment

I’ve always liked moving because it was a fresh start. Even when I moved into my first apartment and acquired furniture, I didn’t mind the move because I had ample amounts of time to unpack, and organize. Even though I still had a lot of stuff in boxes that I never touched, stored in the attic, I felt like I was all settled in pretty quickly. I remember waking up with so much energy when I first moved. Every morning I couldn’t wait to get out of bed and do something exciting. I’m sure a large part of it was that I loved being on my own and living by myself.

First apartment office

When we moved to the townhouse, I still woke up with that abundance of energy every day in the beginning. (My weekend routine was to get up at 6 before anyone else, run to Sheetz down the street for a coffee, and then read/coupon before anyone was up yet.)

Now that we’ve moved into this huge (to us) house, and actually have room to store all of our crap, I’m more stressed out because I haven’t had the free time to go through everything and put it in it’s place. I never realized how stressed out this would make me. My parents were here for the first week, and to my surprise, that was a lot more helpful than stressful. Usually when my parents visit, I’m grateful to see them, but we get on each others nerves, and I feel like I have to be the perfect host. This time, I still felt a little overwhelmed trying to be a good host, but since there was so much to do, we really weren’t on top of each other. My dad took care of a lot of the overgrown landscaping, and my mom was a boss and tore down 4 out of 8 rooms of wallpaper.

These were way overgrown.

Another great thing is that there are children in the neighboring houses (8 directly around us, and another couple down a few houses), so our 6 year old can go outside and play, and for the most part I can try to get stuff done. School starts today (woo hoo), so I’m hoping that a getting into good schedule will help.

I’ve been trying to balance keeping up with my work (I work from home, but still have a lot of deadlines), priming/painting/making minor fixes, watching the mini humans, and doing all the household things (shopping, cooking, cleaning, etc). Oh and unpack…we’re still living out of boxes and not being able to find things is driving me nuts. I was doing great getting out of bed around 5 every morning before we moved, and now I’m struggling at 7 or 8, and I’m dragging all day long.

The sun room was probably my favorite perk of the house (the gazebo will be too, once we clean it out), and yesterday I realized I haven’t really spent any time in it, aside from trying to figure out what color to paint it, or how to get cushions for our wicker set. Yesterday I took a few minutes (while everyone else was napping), and read and drank some tea in the sun room, it was the first bit of relaxing I’ve been able to do for the last 2 weeks and it felt so good.

Finally relaxing

So, this post isn’t really exciting, and I have a lot more interesting things to share about the house, but I wanted to write about how unexpected this whole moving process has been. Not that I haven’t been extremely happy, because I have, and I love everything.

And now, I’m off to give the bathroom a second coat of primer.