making the house a home

I had such great intentions to post an update before we started moving, but things did not work out that way. This is the perfect preamble...

All weekend we were super packers. The apartment was in mass disarray, and each day the cat became more and more skittish. Neither The Hater nor I were sleeping well and the Moving Monster continued to loom overhead, despite how productive we were.

Sunday night we invited ourselves to a friend’s house for dinner. We had wondered if we really should go over, and we had no idea how much we needed to get out of our apartment until we sat down in a living room without boxes and had a place to put up our feet. It was a fantastic visit.

We had our final final walk-through Monday before we closed. After the mountain of paperwork was signed and we were given about twenty keys to the house, we proceeded to make around five trips back and forth from the apartment to the house. We didn’t get to bed until after 2am.

Meanwhile, on Monday the cable/internet/phone people turned off our services one day before we asked them to do so (alas, no goodbye post). Also, some friends were traveling through Oklahoma City and we were able to visit and have dinner with them and their sweet son (although the timing stinks all the way around and we would have really liked to have visited more!).

I was so glad to be able to come to work yesterday so that I did not have to be there when the movers came. The Hater directed them brilliantly, and now the mess that was the apartment is now the mess in the house. After work we went to get Zoloft, who was not excited about the empty apartment.

You really cannot console a cat in a carrier. If you talk to her or try to pet her, she just gets more agitated that she is inside the carrier and not outside the carrier. If you let her outside of the carrier (which we pulled into a parking lot to try) she continues to cry and wiggle and carry on. So we ended up just driving with her in the carrier in the back seat, howling and crying and setting the stage for an even more pitiful welcome home party.

We brought her in and carried her back to the bathroom where her litter and food are now located. She immediately hid inside of her litter box, which was good because we wanted her to know where it was—but at the same time we did not want her to just sit in there with her poo, either. We pulled her out of the litter box and she immediately ran and hid behind the toilet. We sat in the bathroom for a few minutes, talking and petting her before we left to attend to the boxes and eat supper. Several times during the evening we went back to check on her and talk to her, but she continued to hide behind the toilet, voicing her protest to change by pitiful wails.

We opened the door from the bathroom to the bedroom to encourage her to explore. She liked that we had moved her monstrous play house into the bedroom, but everything was still scary and she retreated to behind the toilet.

I opened the door from the bedroom to the living room so that she could see out, which seemed like a good idea at the time. She cried and I consoled her. I showed her that we had also moved the reclining love seat that she likes to sleep on. She cried from the bedroom door. I picked her up and put her on the couch, which she smelled, but was overwhelmed by the big room and everything else. She eyed the bedroom and I really thought she was going to run back to her house (or the toilet). She jumped off of the couch, did a 180, and for the first time climbed between the back of the couch and the material, wailing.

At this point I realized that we brought her out of the bathroom too quickly. It took The Hater and me about ten minutes to get her from behind the seat. I took her back to the bathroom, her safe room, and she went straight for the toilet. We will not be planning any other field trips outside of the bedroom for several days. Hindsight is 20/20.

Meanwhile we had to fix the garage door. It was not a major issue, but it did require balancing on a folding chair and holding my tongue just right to get it working again. Afterwards we congratulated each other on our first handy-dandy-home-owner-fix-it project.

We celebrated too soon.

Our dryer has a three-prong plug. The wall has a four-prong outlet for a plug. We went to one of the local building supply stores and asked them how to make the dryer work. They gave us a four-prong plug. The Hater asked if there was any other plug that it could be instead, and they said NO… An hour later (and after only one phone call to Sister’s fiancé, the electrician, regarding the rogue green wire) The Hater has the wrenches and screw drivers back in their holders, the dryer vent attached, and he realizes, much to his chagrin, that the four-prong plug that is now attached to the dryer does NOT match the four-prong outlet.

Expletive. Phone call. Expletive. Phone call. Expletive. Despite my attempts to illustrate that this will all be funny in a month, The Hater was beyond grossed out. We did not call Sister’s fiancé to report the status of the dryer, although I am sure that it has been perfectly connected. One of the builders will come by the house today to tell The Hater what kind of four-prong plug we need instead of the four-prong plug we have now.

We were up until midnight last night, but have successfully moved boxes around so that the people who bring furniture today will have a place to put it. We lined all of the cabinets and shelves (and magically came out even with the paper). We did the rain dance so that we would get a rain shower during the night.

We went to bed with the bathroom door open to the bedroom so that Zoloft might venture into the bedroom if she found her bravery. She poked around all night, and this morning she was not hiding behind the toilet. Her cries were more telling than frantic, which we took as a good sign.

We are so ready to be finished with boxes and moving. It may be a month or so before we get cable/phone/internet capabilities at home, so my posting may not be consistent for a while longer. I will make a list of more exciting moving stories to tell later.

We are armed Allen wrenches and we are ready for war. If all else fails, we will be hiding behind the toilet.