Stalled

Thursday  in the early afternoon  Mystie

There is so much to do and … not much that I can do.

I actually enjoy unpacking and settling in to a new place. Packing, moving, cleaning the old place, all that is no fun. But then you get a clean slate. Things come out of boxes and get to find a new home. The extra clutter has been purged (that was part of the packing process) and, ideally, everything that comes out of the box in front of you belongs and you get to choose where it will belong.

When we moved into our Pasco rental place almost all the boxes were unpacked and we were pretty much completely settled in only a few days. Of course, in that instance, all things superfluous remained in boxes in the garage.

Now those superfluous boxes are in the living room. But I can’t unpack the living room until all the kitchen stuff — including the refrigerator — is out of it. I can’t unpack the kitchen stuff and get it out of the living room until there are kitchen cabinets — and there aren’t going to be cabinets until there’s new plumbing. I can’t unpack the books because I want the bookshelf at the bottom of the basements stairs and there are kitchen counter materials there. I can’t unpack 4 boxes in the office because I want them unpacked into a filing cabinet, which we don’t yet own. I hope to pick one up for free at the next Battelle surplus day, when they let “educators” go through the junk they want to get rid of once a month, and that’ll be June 6th. The bedrooms are set up and looking nice. The upstairs linen closet is mostly empty, but it will house sheets that are currently nestling glasses and fragile kitchen things or in the hope chest that has, among other things, a microwave sitting on top of it.

Really, the only thing left that I can unpack right now is my desk area: craft stuff. That seems like a last-on-the-list thing. Organize my projects and materials in a new space before the kitchen or living room? Outrageous. Actually, what keeps me from doing that is that I kinda like the scrapbooking things in a taped up box. I was going to do quite a bit while it was set up in the Pasco house before we moved and not a single thing got done. I’m not quite ready for the guilt to be unpacked.

So Matt works like a dog every evening, finishing the essential tasks that are left to make this house functional, and I’m not exactly sure what I’m supposed to be doing, except washing a pair of sippy cups in the bathroom sink each day and running the minimal amount of laundry (because there’s a leak in the line, so we need to keep the water to the machine shut off as much as possible).

At the rate Matt is going, though, perhaps this time next week I will be all moved in and set up.

This entry was posted on Thursday, May 10th, 2007 at 2:17 pm and is filed under Lady of the House. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.