Moving Made Harder

My advice to you is, when you buy a house, don't wait a month to move in. Unless you have to. Unless, in your excitement the day after closing, you tear up all the carpet and linoleum to refinish the hardwood floors, and you rip down all the ugly paneling in the "den" and frame a wall to put up new, modern drywall (as opposed to plaster, I guess), and moving in would mean not finishing the floors. Because you really ought to finish those damn floors before you move in.

I guess waiting a month is rough, because instead of the house being a home, the house is a project that you carry with you to and from work and your real home. It wears one out, I think. But we didn't know that until we'd done it. No one offered any advice, really, and if they had we probably would have told them hush up, we know what we're doing.

Also, if you're not living in the house, it's real easy for a dripping bathroom faucet to turn into a gushing fountain that could potentially flood the entire basement. What? Oh, yeah, yeah, that happened to us. But see, we thought the dripping faucet wasn't anything. We thought the puddle of water in the basement was from the toilet. Later that night, we figured out it was the sink (turned off the faucet, everything dried out).

The next day, when we stopped by to put up drywall, the toilet had flooded and the basement was a mess again. It was the tank, see, it never stopped filling. We turned off the valve to the toilet, but the next day it had flooded again (ghostly? The valve WAS turned off). Three days in a row. It's like a sign from God or something. He deals in threes, you see.

If we'd been living there, those enormous water problems wouldn't have ballooned like they did. We would have caught them at the trickle stage, right?

So, we moved in all the way on Wednesday. Or rather, we moved everything out of the apartment and into the house. We were up until 3 am on Wednesday night doing all that, you know, vacuuming the apartment before we left so they didn't think we were quite so piggish when they came to clean it up for the next tenant.

Something that took longer than we'd expected was moving the cats. They were very frightened. We only had one cat kennel, so we held the other two in our laps. Well, Bastet rode in my arms, Sobek rode on Stoker's shoulder. He really loved riding in the car. Sobek did, that is. (Stoker likes riding in cars, too.)

Bastet is pretty good at riding in the car with me because she's so well traveled. She's been from Mesa, AZ to Salt Lake, and from Mesa to Nashville. She's also ridden on a plane with us. She's a jet-setter, that cat. A hippo jet-setter (I don't know, something about her screams hippo. She's a hulking creature. Beautiful and hulking). Polly (short for Neopolitan, like the ice cream) rode in the kennel -- she's still quite skittish.

The cats hissed a lot in the house, at first. The previous owners had cats who left behind lots of terrible smells. So I think the cats were waiting to be jumped by enormous tom cats or something. That or I'm right about the devil room and there ARE ghosts in the house. Cats can see ghosts, don't you know?

Anyway, it took us longer than we thought to calm the cats down, and even when we left they weren't calm. When we returned from buying new cat litter, Sobek was burrowed between some pillows on the couch. He was like a kid hiding from thunder (I used to hide from thunder under the velvet throw pillows on my mom's couch, so that's how I can make that comparison). When Sobek saw Stoker, he ran into his arms. It was like a Kleenex commercial or a Cat Fancy sponsored music video for "Reunited." It really tugged at the heart strings.

The cats are doing better, the odd thing is that suddenly they're all sleeping on our bed with us and so I can't move at night, lest I kick a cat off the bed. Bastet has successfully rubbed against every possible object, to claim them, as the supreme cat in the household. I think she worked herself into such a frenzy from marauding about the house, shooting out her scent, that now she has a cat cold. Her little eye was a bit oozy last night, poor thing. I told her to rest today. Get some sleep. Recuperate.

Anyway, moving was the most horrible thing I've had to endure for a long time. I thought the glue-scraping was rough, and it was. I thought the sanding was a burden, and it was (especially the devil room. I NEVER thought we'd get through all that black tar. And it WAS tar. I've had it confirmed by several sources). I thought filling the nail holes with stainable filler was rough, and it was. But moving stands as the number one shitty thing a person has to do in their lifetime.

It could have been worse, I could have been 8 months pregnant with a two year old, two cats and a dog, and it could have been from DC to Miami, or Southern California to Miami, or Miami to Denver. Take your pick. Luckily it was from one side of the circle that is Nashville-Davidson, to the other side.


P.S. The floors look excellent, and who can complain about new appliances? Especially a side-by-side fridge when all you've had your entire adult life has been the top-freezer monstrosities apartment complexes offer. The beasts!