Building/moving to a new home – day 82

FOUR DAYS LEFT

Woke up a few hours ago (2:00 am) with that peculiar disorientation of not knowing where I was. I lifted my head and looked around the darkened room and could see no furniture.

For an instant, I thought we had already made the move to Floyd. The room I saw was much like the barren interior of the unfinished house I have been writing about for the last three months.

Sleepy as I was, I laughed quietly as the humor of the situation sank in. We now have two houses and neither are fully ready for occupancy!

Our present home is almost bare of furniture, other than our computer desks, our bed, and a card table in the kitchen.

Our two cats wander disconsolately from room to room, yowling occasionally as they discover that still another favorite perch has vanished. There is nothing so pitiful as a cat preparing to leap onto a piece of furniture that is no longer there. The cat sees that I am watching and slinks away in embarrassment.

Yesterday we finally started packing the Smart Vaults that occupy our driveway. We had planned on a leisurely two-week loading process, but events at the construction site in Floyd took so much time and attention that we are left with only three more days before we leave this house forever. That required a significant escalation in our packing speed.

We had begun packing two weeks ago and the house was full of boxes, but we had not progressed to loading the vaults. I called in reinforcements on Saturday and they spent most of Sunday loading three of the vaults to the brim, while Gretchen and I worked madly on packing boxes to keep ahead of them.

One of the people we hired, Charles Nevins, is a neighbor. He is a jack of all trades who does meticulous work, whether it is landscaping or helping us move. He showed great skill in packing the shipping containers solidly so nothing could shift and get damaged. It turns out that he moonlighted as a mover some years ago to augment his income. He has been a godsend, as I had no experience packing storage.

We finally called a halt to the vault loading when they had loaded all of the furniture and nothing was left except for piles of unboxed possessions strewn about in every room. Think of a house where someone has suddenly repossessed all of the furniture and you will have the right image.

Gretchen and I will box everything on Monday and our helpers will return Tuesday to finish the job. By Tuesday night, we will be down to living in minimalist style. The house will be empty except for two cat cages, a card table and folding chairs and our airbed.

Our vans will be packed with all we need to support life during the next few weeks and we will begin the task of transporting those things, like plants and fragile electronic equipment which will not go into the vaults.

This will take several trips and there are a number of challenges to overcome. Neither the new house in Floyd or the workshop are complete yet, and the ground in Floyd is covered with several inches of snow and ice, so we will have to get quite bright in terms of juggling cats, plants, and possessions so nothing runs away, gets frozen or gets snowed on.

The vaults will be picked up Thursday and we will sign the closing documents Friday. Between now and then, we will be driving between here and Floyd with a cargo of screaming cats and trailer loads of household goods through some serious winter weather.

The purchaser of our present house wants to move in next Monday, so we are all playing musical houses! We will work it all out, even though delays in construction have put us up against the stops as far as having accommodations ready when we needed them.

Stay tuned, it should be an interesting show. Anyone want to put up two cats for a week?