A Life of Transition

Todd and I are trying to buy a new house. Needless to say we’re trying to sell our current house as well. We’ve re-painted nearly every wall, we put down new carpet through the whole house, and we built a new deck on the side of the house, to cover the huge mud puddle that forms there every spring. Then we packed up all of our extra stuff. Our dive gear, camping gear, camera gear, gear gear and any extra things we don’t use on a daily basis now reside in a storage unit. We wanted the house to look less cluttered and show better for potential buyers. (You would not believe how many houses we’ve been in over the course of our search whose owners did not do this, and it looks terrible. We even went into one house where the sellers didn’t bother to clean the multiple plies of dog shit off the floor in one of their rooms! Yet we’re paranoid about paw prints on the floor when we show our house.) The house looks great; we’ve been more concerned with keeping it neat just in case the real estate agent calls with a last minute showing request all in hopes of someone ponying up.

We found a house that we love and we put the offer in. The deal ended up falling through—which is just as well because our house hasn’t sold yet. We thought that we would be in the new house in December, but it didn’t happen. We are still in our current house, but without all of our stuff. There are no pictures on the walls, there are no books on the shelf and hell the shelves are gone too. Now that the Christmas tree has been kicked to the curb, I can hear a slight echo when I speak in the living room. The only things that are left in our house are most of our clothing, furniture and our kitchen stuff.

I never knew how nerve-wracking it would be to have all our stuff in storage for an indefinite period of time. There are 40 some-odd boxes in our storage unit. Each box contains some little thing that we want to use, but we cannot find these items without taking every last box out and opening every single one until we find it. Needless to say, we haven’t gone scavenging for our stuff just because it would be too much of a hassle. But I cannot charge my iPod because the charger cable is in a box the storage bin. Todd couldn’t transfer all the data off his dive computer onto his laptop because that cable is in the storage unit too.

Lately we are getting to the point where find ourselves buying duplicates of things we already have, because it would be insane to go through the whole storage unit to find the one thing we want to use. A few weeks ago when we went to a holiday party we realized that we had packed any shoes that would go with his suit or my dress. On the way to the party we had to stop at a shoe store to get shoes that we could wear to the party.

At this point I do not know what will take longer, for us to find a house that we want to live in or for someone to buy our house. I do know that I am thisclose to driving the truck to the storage unit and getting our stuff out again, just so I can listen to my iPod at the gym again. If I have to hear “Electric Avenue” over the gym’s musak one more time…