I hate moving. It's an extremely frustrating process. First you have to go through everything you own and decide what comes with you and what stays. That alone is hard because who knows if you'll ever need or want some of those things you've had for years, if not for your whole life. There's so much stuff you live with everyday that you never give any thought to, but when it comes time to decide if it stays or goes you have to figure out just what kind of impact that something has on your life. Once you make all those critical decisions, you then have to box it all up in a way that the majority of it will make it to the new place relatively unscathed. And finally, you have to unload it and find a new space for each and every thing that you brought with you. The perfect shelf or container or closet where it used to reside is no longer available and you have to re-think everything. It's hard.
It's especially hard when you are moving somewhere sans some very important things. Like a couch or a chair or a coffeetable or end tables or bedside tables or shelves or a kitchen table. You get the idea. Of the "important things to have in an apartment", Jeff and I have a bed and a dresser. Yeah, that's about it. There are a few random chairs and parts of a desk and two bookshelves, but none are really appropriate or in the proper condition for fulltime use. We're starting from scratch. Which in some ways is exciting. It's all up to us. We can make this place anything we want it to be (well, if we had a lot of money we could). But at the same time it's frustrating, because we don't even know where to start. We don't have anything to build on. We're painting the walls, buying a couch, finding a coffee table, all with nothing but a blurry vision we have in our minds. And who knows if our two visions are even remotely the same. It sounds like maybe they are, but things are so blurry we could very well be looking at two completely different pictures.
But really, this will be fun. Our place is nice. Jeff did an excellent job of picking it out. For the price we are paying (God, DC is expensive!!), we have a good size apartment that is well arranged. It's also clean, quiet, and conveniently located to both the metro (a 4 minute walk) and any kind of store we could ever need. Plus it's in a residential-type area. We live in a condo in a neighborhood full of condos. But it doesn't feel overly planned or sterile. There are many individual buildings each with a few condos per building. The buildings extend into a neighborhood of sorts, where instead of having a single family house as your neighbor you have a multiple-condo building. In between there are lots of trees, and the area is very green. There's even a creek right down the street. In many ways, the area reminds me of the neighborhood my Grandma lived in. Big oak trees shade the entire neighborhood, and squirrels and chipmunks scurry all around the grounds picking up and burying acorns. The grass is full of clovers and other shade loving ground covering and the dirt is old and crumbly. It smells like my Grandma's neighborhood smelled, which is a comforting thing. I like it.
So yes, our place is currently empty except for boxes and piles of homeless objects, but it has potential and eventually it will become a place that I think I can call home. And if you know me, that's saying a lot. Home is a sacred word in my book.
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