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
