On Moving and New Houses

We've moved a lot during these past eleven years as a Navy family.  This marks move number six and also the first time we've been forced to move even though we weren't actually leaving the area.  It would figure that the first time my husband has ever received orders to stay in one place for multiple tours, our landlords would decide to sell their house.

Luckily we have wonderful friends and family who all descended upon us to make what could have been a very unpleasant situation about as good as an unexpected move across town could be.  The whole process from finding out we needed to move, to securing a new house, to actually moving in was ridiculously fast, even by military move standards.

Three weeks.

Three weeks from notice of the impending sale, to my dad and all of Chris' most muscular friends loading all our various household goods onto a rental truck and unloading them in our new home--including the new piano which I had assured my husband upon acquisition would not be a problem because the military always move us so we wouldn't have to worry about handling it ourselves.  Did I mention we have wonderful friends?

I still haven't really had time to process everything, it all happened so quickly and there was so much that needed to be done.

I loved our old house.  It was by far my favorite house of all our houses.  I loved its character, its swinging door into the kitchen, the sun room full of windows, Margaret's tiny nursery, the gas fireplace that we kept going all winter long, the one random glass doorknob, the low place in the fence where the kids would hop back and forth into the neighbor's yard to play.  It was a "Colonial" whereas our new house is a "Rambler."  I'm not sure what that is exactly, but it sure doesn't have the same historic, charming feel.

I don't want to be unfair to The Rambler, it does have many good points, not least of which is that, unlike our old home, this one has never caught fire, so that's reassuring.  We are in a much quieter area so the kids are able to roam free and ride bikes which they haven't done since we left Florida.    There's an actual garage which was very exciting for Chris.  The house has also been recently flipped so the kitchen and bathrooms are all almost brand new and the basement's been redone too so we have a nice big room to play and do school in.  It's all very new and and bright and clean.  

One of the best things about the new house is that it has been updated--and also the fact that it doesn't smell musty or like cats--which is no small feat in this area and our price range.  But I think the newness of it is also why I don't love it.  I keep thinking about this passage from West With the Night,

"The walls of my house are without memories, or secrets, or laughter.  Not enough of life has been breathed into them--their warmth is artificial, too few hands have turned the window latches, too few feet have tread the thresholds. The boards of the floor, self-conscious as youth or falsely proud as the newly rich, have not yet unlimbered enough to utter a single cordial creak.  In time they will, but not for me." 

Maybe it's the fact that we move so much that I crave a home with history and charm.  A place with quirks and hominess built in since we don't generally have time to make those ourselves.  Of course being perpetual renters means that the quirky homes I love aren't always good choices since they tend to need work and you can't redo a rental kitchen even if it begs you to.  So we compromise and go with the updated house with the lovely kitchen full of pretty finishes that nevertheless makes me crazy because it was obviously designed by a flipper and not someone who actually planned to ever cook in it.

And yes, I realize that I'm complaining because my new house is too nice and new.  I can't help it, I like little cozy old homes, and while I'm sure this little new home will feel more cozy eventually it's not quite there yet.  

The Move Begins

We'll, we are officially moved out of our house of the past two years--the moving truck is gone, house cleaned, keys turned in.  Chris pretty much handled everything including John Michael while the big boys, baby and I have spent most of the past two days alternating between saying goodbye to our friends and watching live TV in the cabin we rented behind our house--which is apparently an unfathomable nightmare for children whose viewing options are generally limited to Netflix and Amazon Prime:

child:  "I want to watch something different"
me:     "There isn't anything different, this is live TV."
child:   blank stare
me:     "Live TV means shows play one after another, you just have to watch the show that's playing right now."
child:   "Well just pause it then."
me:      "It doesn't pause, it's just TV"
child:   angry blank stare
me:      "It just doesn't pause."
child:   "Well can I at least have that super obnoxious Jake and the Neverland Pirates ship that doesn't even come with Captain Hook/amazing sugar cereal I've never seen before/cruise ship trip to the Caribbean?
me:     face palm

I did manage to make Chris take some unrelated pictures of me and the baby in between all of the goodbyes and television rants so I haven't been totally useless throughout this process.

As much as I don't love the climate in Florida and the fact that I'm pretty sure we are all allergic to the whole area in general, I'm really going to miss it here--especially all the friends we've made and living on base where everything was just so easy.

As I watched our moving truck filling up the reality of our leaving finally hit me.......but that wave of sadness was quickly overshadowed by the dread of knowing I'd have to put all of those things away again come Monday morning--probably with a house full of children running wild and attempting to escape out of the open front door directly into a very busy street.

That's the way it goes.  There's no time to mope when there's so much that still needs to be done.   I'll just have to save the moping for later, right now I've got a long drive tomorrow and one whole weekend to mentally prepare for the unpack......or pretend that it's not actually happening, we'll see how I feel.

I'm sure it will all work out in the end.  It usually does :)

On Finally Knowing

So after months and months of hardly knowing anything at all about what our next year will look like, we finally do know some things!

But I'm afraid you'll have to scroll through these completely unrelated pictures from our vacation to find out what those things are.....

 Fort Macon group photo fail.

 Only child who willingly has his picture taken refuses to make normal faces.

 That's right, he's already picking flowers for mom :)

Well during our trip we heard from Chris' detailer that we definitely have orders to go to the Pentagon in November--well as definite as orders can be until you actually have them printed off and are on your way to check out from your command, that is :)  

The detailer also said he could push the orders to December 1 to give us more than two weeks postpartum to do the big move so that was thoughtful.  Is it crazy to try to move to DC in December?  Less crazy than moving in say September--hugely pregnant by yourself with three kids?

Wherever we go, we definitely need a pile of dirt at our new place.  I have never seen children more engrossed in their play than when mine were busy on the dirt mountain/castle/fort/prison/"lego castle" (which is completely different than a regular castle in case you, like me, didn't know).

Also, a hose, we will definitely have a hose.

And a daughter, if all goes well, we will also be settling into our new place with a brand new baby girl :)

David is beyond excited and has requested a curly haired, red-headed sister but has said that a "plain regular sister" would be fine as well.  I guess I'll see what I can do.

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The Boys' Room

So aside from taking the children to the zoo and lopping off all of their hair, I've been a tad bit busy setting up the house.  I unpacked everything pretty quickly--well as quickly as you can with two and a half littles attempting to help and no husband actually helping--and by everything I mean absolutely nothing in the disaster that is our garage....

None of the rooms are finished since I need some man help to hang up the super heavy things and rearrange furniture and watch children while I hit the antique/thrift stores in the area but the boys' room is coming along nicely and since I've had some requests for pictures I thought I'd oblige :)

If you look closely you will see that the movers decided to put the beds together bunk bed style so Henry currently has both headboards while David got stuck with the two footboards....I'm waiting for Chris to come home and remedy that situation.  I decided to store our extra twin mattresses (what don't you have random twin mattresses laying around your house too?) under the boys' beds so now we need bed skirts to hide those as well.  I think I want to put some shelves or cubbies over their beds so they can each keep their special treasures safe--from each other......

I ended up putting most of the toys in their bedroom so we got this IKEA shelf to hold the baskets--this is pretty much everything except the trains which are in the living room which is the preferred track building location and the games and puzzles which are up high in the closet to inhibit rousing games of dumping-while-mommy's-not-looking.....

I want to build some of these shelves along the other wall to house our picture books and make a little reading nook spot with pillows, etc.--but again--man's work :)

For now our books are being housed in some makeshift cubbies in the closet--which we keep under strict guard day and night.......

I prefer the room with the closet doors closed :)

I'd hate for you to think that the boys keep their room neat and tidy at all times though, so here are a couple of shots I took later in the morning.  David informed me that they made a "trampoline" after a stint of manic costume changes.  But, since everything has a place it really only took five minutes to get this picked up before naps :)

PS about five minutes after these pictures were taken, I came back to David calling me, saying Henry was "hiding."  Apparently "hiding" meant he had been shut into the costume suitcase that David was sitting on top of.  Henry thought this was hilarious..........I did not......so we had a little talk about why we don't lock our brothers into boxes, even if they do ask you to, since they need air to, you know, breathe.....

Roughing It

Well, we've officially moved in--and by moved in I mean we are living in our house and hopefully we will have furniture by tomorrow--so we've been roughing it......

I rented some camping cots from the marina here--they tried to convince me that I didn't want them as they were 1950's cots and don't have whatever features a newfangled cot would have, but I figured anything was better than sleeping on the floor.  Of course later that night when I attempted to assemble them I found that only two cots actually had all of the pieces and the other was just a bag of metal rods without the canvas bed section which is kind of important....So I did what any good mom who desperately wants her children to go to bed would do and gave them the good cots while I slept laid on the floor and stared at the ceiling until dawn.  Then since Chris had arrived for the weekend, the first order of business was to purchase a new queen mattress for our guest room/nursery that we could sleep on until the rest of the furniture arrived.  I never knew how good a mattress on the floor could feel! 

We also subjected the children to a two and a half hour drive (each way) to the nearest IKEA so that we could pick up the bookshelves and storage pieces I wanted so that Chris could lift and assemble everything while he was still here.  They were just as excited about two hours spent in IKEA as their daddy was but everyone was a real trooper and now our house currently has one set of bookshelves in the bonus room, one cube shelf in the boys' room and one mattress set in the guest room--which is currently the only place to sit down that's not the floor.....and a tunnel system made from boxes in the living room.....moving is so fun :)  

Our Old House

...well really it's our current house but for the past two months David's been referring to it as the "old house" as in, "I want to live in our old house" and "I want to bring our old house with us to Florida".......

You'll just have to forgive me for the gratuitous house pictures you are about to be subjected to but I like to use this blog as a place to document our lives so that I can look back through old posts and get nostalgic for how little everyone used to be and I'm feeling more than a little nostalgic and weepy at the thought of leaving this home.  It's the first real home we've had as a family--it's hard to count a less than a year stint in an apartment when David was born as a home--we've made real adult friends here, we've had and lost babies here, we've grown here and we are not the same people leaving it as we were when we arrived.....Yes, I've loved the time we've spent at this "old house".......

PS I don't normally go around randomly photographing the house--I took these for our landlord so she could get new tenants--which she did after approximately three days of posting the ad--I think it's because we changed all of the wall colors from circus extraordinaire to neutral, neutral, neutral.....I'd show you the befores but I'd hate to damage your retinas......

I'm going to miss this old place--all 1300 square feet of it, including the master bedroom which for some reason doesn't have any heat or air vents and the thin walls and of course all the character and charm that comes with sixty year old homes.....but compared to our new place this house is a spring chicken :)  

I know, it's not incredibly impressive and this is pretty much it, minus one tiny bathroom and landing at the top of the stairs.  I think my decorating style could be described as part cottage and part hand-me-down with a sprinkling of I-found-it-on-the-side-of-the-road-and-spray-painted-it for good measure.  Mostly I try to keep the house looking tidy, uncluttered, and most of all cozy so it has that homey feel we love so much :)

Ah, Military Moves....

....they aren't as fun as you might think.....

We got a call from the housing office in Jacksonville today letting us know that they had given our house to another family who had an exceptional family member and therefore trumped us and our desire to live on base.  Luckily they offered us the house next door but couldn't tell us for sure when we'll be able to move in-maybe a week later, maybe September.....to that I just say...fantastic.....

I've got to come up with a new plan for what to do in the meantime and I guess we'll just put our things into storage in Florida until we have a home to deliver them to which I really don't want to do because it's always a hassle to get your household goods back out of storage.  If there's one thing I've learned from all of these moves is that you just have to be flexible and learn to roll with all of the....hmmm....I'll be positive and just call them.....challenges....or maybe opportunities to practice patience.....


In the more exciting moving news category we had an amazing wheeling and dealing day today.

I sold our playset on Craigslist about an hour after I posted it for exactly what I paid for it two years ago (also on Craigslist)--of course we ended up with a little less than that as my tender-hearted husband knocked $20 off the price telling me that that dad needed it more than we did :)

We also bought our very first washer and dryer at a local shop that sells GE appliances.  The owner (who was helping us) was wonderful and helped us pick out exactly what we needed--the same set he and his wife has which funnily enough was not the fancy set you'd imagine the owner of an appliance store owning but the just plain-ol'-regular set.  He also congratulated us for paying in cash--I believe Chris actually got a "good boy!"  We got a great deal, supported a local business, and they're delivering the appliances in the boxes so they'll be well protected during the move and we'll have two giant boxes for the boys to play with once we arrive--a win win win all around.

David did his part to help us get a good deal by tugging on the owner's sleeve, pointing at his rather rotund stomach and saying:

"Excuse me, excuse me.  You have a really big belly."

Luckily he had a great sense of humor and just laughed.  I didn't know what to do so I took a cue from him and gave my own nervous/awkward laugh and tried to change the subject.  We found out later that the man was not only the owner of the appliance store but also the mayor--so to recap, David called the mayor of our little city fat and the lovely mayor responded by giving him lollypops and bottles of water.

I love not buying things from big box stores--so many more interesting things happen when you check out what the locals have to offer.

PS.  We did give David a lecture when we got home about how it's not nice to tell people that they have large bellies.  I'm sure he's taken it to heart and will never embarrass us in public again....he's easy to teach like that :)

Even More News......

......we aren't going to be homeless after all!  In a miraculous turn of events the three to six month wait to get into base housing has turned out to be a mere one and a half months instead and our new home will be ready in time to move our stuff straight there (as opposed to the movers putting everything into storage which is where things have a habit of disappearing....).  Did I mention we were moving to Jacksonville, FL?  We are.  It's official :)

Apparently most of the people on the housing waitlist want the brand new, big, beautiful, two car garage townhouses (go ahead check out the videos) as opposed to the small 1940's bungalows which I have been unable to find a single picture of anywhere and everyone in front of us passed on our new house.  I don't know if that bodes well for us but I'm not so picky as all that.....I mostly just wanted a house.  On base.  That I could move into now.   So I wouldn't be homeless and doctor-less.  So this one seems to fit the bill.......  

Our new dreamhome apparently sits right next door to a playground on a little culdesac with a handful of other single family homes and lots of trees, so that sounds nice.  And I can apparently cut through the backyard and....ta da!....pop out right in front of the naval hospital.  You can't get much more convenient than that!  

I wonder if they let you stroll your new baby home as opposed to performing the mandatory car seat installation check when you live right around the corner?

Here's the floorplan....it's the only thing I have to go on aside from an aerial google maps shot---apparently you can't do street views on military bases :)

It's actually larger than our current house--if you can believe it--but it doesn't have a fenced in yard which is a bummer.  The main downside of the house is that it appears to be seriously lacking in the storage department.  I've been spoiled in our current house (old as it may be) with all of the built in storage/cabinets/basement/giant walk in closets that run the length of the second floor.  I think I'm definitely going to need to purchase some extra cabinets to create some kind of makeshift pantry/place to store extra kitchen and utility room type things.  Maybe like these....and then assemble them myself--which might be an interesting adventure......I'm pretty sure if I don't invest in extra storage right away I won't be able to actually unpack our stuff as there won't be anywhere to put it!  

I also have no idea what I'm going to do with the "specialty room" up in the top right corner.  It looks pretty small.  I could maybe put David's old twin bed with the trundle in there for extra sleeping space but that may be pretty much everything that fits in there.....Chris doesn't want to use it as a playroom but that's definitely where I'm leaning....Well if you aren't there to help move and unpack you don't get the final say right?  

I also really want to get a new bookcase so that our book collection isn't just stashed in corners/on top of tables/stuffed in said built in cabinets all over the house.  I think it's time to let our IKEA expedit go--I really don't think you are supposed to disassemble and move it three times....or ever.  I've had my eye on something along the lines of this but we'll see.  Moving is so expensive.....even when the military pays for it....things just come up that the new place requires that the old one didn't.  In addition to giant cabinets for the laundry room we also need a washer and dryer, either a queen size mattress or twin box-frames (depending on which of our various bed frames we decide to actually use this time in our new guest room/nursery), and the obligatory curtain rods, shower rods, closet organizers, rugs, etc that you inevitably realize you need because the sizes you had before won't work in the new house.  Oh, and patio furniture, but I guess that's more of a want than a need......

Oh well, I've seen at least three decent washer/dryer options on craigslist and we're going to check out the local scratch and dent to see what they've got.  I've never bought a washer or a dryer before--they've always just found their way to us of their own accord so I don't really know anything about them, but I do want to buy them now so the movers can move and connect them and I won't have to deal with accomplishing that myself.....not that I'm not capable, I just don't want to :)  

Well, I'd better get back to hypothetically decorating the new house.....you know, the one that I really have no idea what it actually looks like.......I do love a good surprise......