Sunday morning November 12, 2023
So, the deed is done.
We now live
in a townhouse with four rooms (not counting bathrooms and hallways). As I have
related earlier, on the main floor we have a kitchen and a bedroom. The kitchen
has two adjoining sitting areas and a dining area, but it's one room. The bedroom
is the largest one I've ever had (although that bar is pretty low because I've
never had a "large" bedroom, but even so this one is good sized).
On the lower
level there is a large room and a small room. One is my office; the other is
general purpose. Mostly to be used by Gary.
In our 1931
bungalow, we had nine discrete rooms. Nonetheless, we went from about 1700 finished
square feet in that house to about 2000 finished square feet in the townhouse.
I haven't measured, but I think our kitchen and surrounds is over half the
square footage.
I am glad
to have read, in many places, that continuing to face mental challenges is one
way to forestall cognitive decline, because I face mental challenges almost
daily in trying to learn the local geography. Gone are the ordered alphabetic
and numeric streets and avenues of Minneapolis that I have lived with almost my
entire life. Now there are "drives" and "courts" and other
designations for streets. They curve every which way. My poor brain has to
absorb an entirely new and wholly irregular map of the area. I have to use
Google maps just to go to the hardware store.
We had six
days between closing and moving day (by design). Kathy abhors wallpaper (I like
it in some places but don't feel strongly enough about it to argue for it), so
we had almost all the (golfing-focused and Paris-focused) wallpaper removed and
the walls repainted. I was dumbfounded by the cost of a gallon of paint. I had
the illusion that it would cost about $30-40 for a good-quality paint. So when
we were at the local Sherwin-Williams store, I told the guy I preferred to buy
high-quality paint because it covers better and cleans better. That would be
$121 per gallon, he told me. Nope. He then told us that for walls that don't
see a lot of wear, their third-from-bottom-in-quality paint worked fine. Only
$70 per gallon. Yikes.
The move
itself was routine. We had a good moving crew (we and they joked several times)
and nothing of note broke. No surprise to me, although it was to them: It took
them longer than they'd scheduled and they had to add a fifth mover to finish
by the end of the day. I told the guy at the moving company that his estimate
of time was too low. I was right. We had far more boxes than they expected,
even though I warned them!
One oddity
of moving: The moving company would not move houseplants. They won't move
anything "alive." I can understand refusing to move pets, like cats
and dogs and so on, but houseplants? We have several large plants that are in
good-sized ceramic pots—so they are heavy. I didn't want to lift them. I argued
unsuccessfully that their policy was stupid (I was more polite than that).
Fortunately, a friend had an SUV in which we could fit the plants without
breaking off tops or branches, so we got them moved, but I still had to lift and
carry the darn things. If you're planning on moving someday, and you have heavy
houseplants, be aware. (We also had several pots with nothing but dirt in them,
for Kathy's vegetables next spring—we have a wonderful south-facing deck that
will be perfect for growing vegetables—and they didn't even want to move those;
"we're not supposed to move soil." For Pete's sake. The team leader,
however, said that if I signed a waiver, they'd move them. I did. What am I
worried about with the waiver? That they're going to dump them out during the
move?)
Despite
having movers (who were very good about putting all the boxes and furniture
where we told them to (including the pots with dirt!), we still ended up lifting
and carrying a lot of boxes hither, thither, and yon once the movers had
departed. We used ibuprofen several times.
I think we
surprised ourselves by getting about 90% of the unpacking and putting away done
in 4-5 days. That efficiency was no doubt helped by the fact that CenturyLink,
our internet provider, couldn't get here until six days after we moved; we
didn't have the distraction of email and web. (I hate doing email on my phone;
youngsters and even some older folks can use both hands and key almost as fast
as on a laptop keyboard. I cannot, so for me it's one letter at a time, a
tedious and annoying way to communicate and certainly not one I can use for anything
more complicated than a couple of sentences.)
Kathy and I
were both prepared to have a friendly disagreement about how much to hang on
the walls and where to hang it. We didn't. Another surprise. What's puzzling
both of us is two wall spaces (fairly large): we don't have anything to hang on
them that we particularly like. We have things but we're both "meh"
about our choices. Inasmuch as we moved with far more items to hang than we
have wall space, and still have items lined up against the wall in the lower
level, the idea that we'll buy *more* things to hang on the wall is astonishing—and
not in the cards. We do not want *more* stuff.
You know one
of the things I miss most about our old house? The basement. It served not only
as laundry room but also storage room for Xmas decorations, the additional
refrigerator and freezer, extra foodstuffs, winter jackets, and a multitude of
other things. Now we have no basement. Finding a place for all that stuff has been
a challenge. (And yes, we kept too much.)
One benefit
of the move for me is that I finally get to use my antique sound system to
listen to music while painting. It is antique because I have two speakers (that
can double as end tables, a style that Kathy tells me is no longer made) that I
bought when I still lived at home with my parents (so sometime in the late
1960s; my mother thought the $35 I paid for each of them was outrageous). The
receiver also dates from an earlier age, although it has a connection for a CD
player, so I guess it's from the mid-1980s. All of that antique equipment was on
our main floor, so I rarely used it. When I unpacked it all, I would not have
been surprised if one or more parts of this system were kaput; they've all seen
many moves and they're so old. But nope, after I got it set up—which I had to
think about a bit since I hadn't disconnected and reconnected everything for
over three decades—it broadcast perfectly good sound.
My ear may
not be that great; maybe it isn't perfectly good sound. But it sounds good to
me. I'm not an audiophile.
In terms of (not) decluttering, I
am playing a sneaky trick on Elliott & Martha. Over the last couple of
years, as I attempted to declutter, I've been putting items in boxes and
labeling them "items for Elliott." They are all xerox boxes, so
decent sized, and there are about 15 of them. It's a wide miscellany, and I've
told him that he and Martha can decide whatever they wish about the contents of
the boxes--just don't tell me what they did. (Yes, he knows about the boxes but
has no idea what's in any of them.) So I've passed the decision about many
things to him 😊 I have been careful
to tell him—and put small notes in or on objects—so he knows their provenance.
I won't be around to know what disposition he makes of all of it!
One set of items we owned were
coffee cups and saucers that went with my (from my marriage to Pat) china. They
had sat in the back corner of a cupboard for the entire time I lived in the
house. They were small cups, but that didn't matter; almost no one drinks
coffee at night anymore (after a dinner party, for example). I didn't want to
keep them. Kathy offered them to her niece as espresso cups—and her niece took
them. Glad they'll be put to use.
In one significant respect the City
of Minneapolis has it all over the suburb of Minnetonka (and probably plenty of
other suburbs, although I don't know that): In Minneapolis you can put out just
about anything on garbage day and the city will take it, and if you have more
recycles or garbage than your bin can hold, you put them out anyway and the
city will take it. In Minnetonka, if it doesn't fit in the bins, you can't leave
it out; you have to transport it yourself to a disposal or recycling site. (And
you may not leave your bins visible; they either have to be surrounded by a
wall or kept in your garage. I suppose all my friends in the suburbs are
accustomed to these regulations; we are not. I think there is great virtue in
the city policy.)
It has been interesting to watch
Elliott & Martha transform the house that I lived in for 34 years. We had
rather conventional colors on the walls: white, a pale green here and there, a small
maroon accent wall. (The "family room" had lightish olive green walls
and cranberry carpeting, modeled after the colors in Sir John Soane's Museum in
London.) They are painting the rooms teal and turquoise and forest green and
navy and maroon and a dark yellow, with occasional goldish-yellow accents. I
speculated that my great-aunt Inez, who lived in the house from 1940 to 1989,
would be shocked at the new wall colors, but then I decided "no, she would
not," because at one point she painted the kitchen a bright pink. In any
event, I'm sure she'd just be astonished but pleased that her great-great
nephew and his wife are now living in her house, after her great-nephew (me)
lived there for the 34 years after she did.
One of my
friends wrote back after my last "moving" epistle. "Your note
about "getting rid of bowls, platters. . . " reminds me of one of my
colleagues/friends who 'downsized' all of their eating stuff to 4 plates, 4
bowls, and 4 sets of silverware. She
said it was the most free-ing thing she ever did." That works if you never
want to have company—and you want to wash all your dishes by hand every time
you use them.
Another
friend wrote back that she agreed with our sentiment that we didn't want to
move into a senior community and live "amongst a bunch of old people."
She added "ha!" My friend is 90.
OK, I'm all
done with stories about moving.
Gary
