Well that was madness.
But we did it! We packed up and signed away our Wyoming home. Now I understand why people pay $10,000 to have professional movers do all the packing and loading for them. Absolutely not a possibility for us, but I can understand why you would do that if you had the money to throw around.
There's a moving truck shortage in Wyoming right now. Probably in lots of other places too. Jared made three reservations (one at each of the moving truck companies in Casper) knowing there was a good chance one or more would fall through. Good foresight.
Originally the biggest, cheapest option was a 20' truck from U-haul. That was already going to be a tight squeeze for a 3-bedroom house, but there wasn't anything bigger available. Then two days before the move we got a call from U-haul saying they didn't have a truck available for us anymore. Cool.
Our other options were a 16' truck from Budget, which I laughed in Jared's face at when he told me, and a 24' truck from Penske that was for some reason $2,000 more expensive than the other options. We're not made of money, so we went with the 16' Budget truck, and luckily (or maybe unluckily) that one didn't fall through.
16' of truck is not enough for a 3-bedroom house. Not even close. We ended up selling, donating, giving away, and finally throwing in dumpsters, nearly all of our furniture. Kind of weird to watch this collection of thrifted furniture I've lovingly collected over the past 7 years just get chucked in a dumpster at 1:00 a.m. because we were out of time and had no other options.
Luckily we were able to sell almost all our bigger items on Facebook marketplace pretty quickly. We'll put that toward the bare essentials in our next place: a couch and a dining table that may take months to arrive due to 2021 shipping delays. We were able to hold onto our king mattress and bed frame (but not our guest bed--sorry family, hopefully we'll have a new one by the end of the year). Also our midcentury thrifted record table and a few pieces of patio furniture, and our dressers. But not much else. The silver lining is that we can start fresh and I can use my InTeRiOr DeSiGn CeRtIfIcAtE skills to choose out exactly what we want (within reason). The tricky part is that it'll probably take quiiiite a while until our next home is fully furnished. Like I said, I'll push for a dining table and couch from the get-go, and from there we can plan and save up for the rest. Maybe there will even be a killer thrift store near our next hometown. Please bless. Jared is not a fan of the thrifted furnitures, but golly I love a good thrift find.
I'm glad I started packing for this move in February. It was still a scramble at the end though. Our ward missionaries came by two evenings before we had to be out of our house and helped Jared load the truck while I taped dressers closed and went on a sandwich run. Then when they had to leave an hour later, Jared and I played moving truck tetris and made a thousand trips to thrift stores and dumpsters to make everything fit.
On our last night in our house, we got a text from our buyers telling us they were going to be in town at 8:00 a.m. for the walkthrough and needed to be able to move in immediately after. Would've been nice to know. Our realtor had told us we had until after closing in the late afternoon, but we told the buyers we'd try to be out in the morning. So we stayed up most of the night making final preparations and cleaning everything. It all turned out ok, but we are very exhausted and living like hobos with our cars stuffed full of all the random odds and ends from our house that wouldn't fit in the truck.
We're happy to be settled into our hotel now, even if Jack did discover the magic of an easily accessible microwave and burn a bag of popcorn so badly that our entire floor reeks of smoke. Jared's residency graduation is tomorrow, and then we'll hit the road for Washington. Hopefully the worst of the record-breaking Seattle heat-wave will be over by then! Here are some highlights from our last week:
Ok so to make a very long story hopefully a little bit shorter... (because we're down to 2 weeks and I should prolly be spending all my free time packing...)
In conclusion, it was worth the 15-hour drive both ways to find our new home in Washington over the weekend. A million thanks to my parents for staying with Jack in our home while we made the trek (we wanted to check out the mountain highway going through Montana before we commit to driving a moving truck across it), and we're really, really excited for the area where we'll be living. We're in a rural area a few hours North of Seattle, but within an hour of the ocean and with rivers and hiking right in our backyard. See for yourself:
Happy Memorial Day! We've had a great weekend together. It seems like the first holiday weekend in a looong time that Jared didn't have to work at all. On Saturday we went on and adventure to Martin's Cove, walked through the visitor's center, and did some hiking. I'll do a post with pictures from that day later this week.
Today we started our holiday with a ward breakfast in the neighborhood park. Jared was in charge of it, but luckily I have a friend in the ward who loves a good party and even loves coordinating everything, and she also was recently called as RS president, so she really helped us pull the whole thing together. Turned out great. We had plenty of food and a decent showing.
We spent Jack's nap packing up a few boxes. We took on the "sentimental stuff" category today, which is in my opinion the toughest category because it's easy to get caught up in the nostalgia and decide what stays and what goes. We had fun going through old letters and photos, but it feels good to be onto the next category. We did a big chunk of our packing before we listed our home for sale, so now we're able to just do a few boxes here and there and not feel like we're drowning. After Jack woke up we played and had a yummy dinner and roasted pastry dough cooked over the fire on these "Wolf 'em" roasting sticks I got for my birthday from Jared's parents.
