a wintry walk around the neighborhood

after a week of cold, rainy days, we had a light snow last night. it left everything a little frosty.

in the sunny day that followed, the frost began to melt, only to refreeze as sparkling ice drops.

nature's ornaments!

stay warm.

moving: lessons learned

things i'm glad we did...

• hired professionals to load and unload our pod. it was way cheaper than the quote we received for a full-service move. (despite needing an extra pod...see below)
• ordered our bedroom furniture before we moved. we verified the measurements against the room dimensions prior to ordering and the furniture arrived within our first week in the house.

things i wish i knew before we moved...

• once the dining room table is gone, you will probably walk into the hanging light fixture. it hurts. put a chair under the light fixture to spare yourself the headache.
• hold on to those 'donate' dishes until right before you move...in our overzealous-ness to purge, we gave away our random dishes too early. once our boxes were packed, we had to use paper goods. sorry earth.
• if a large moving pod holds "3 rooms' worth" of stuff, one of those rooms is probably the bathroom. our two bedroom townhouse required about one and a half pods (and that's without the master bedroom furniture).
• pulling out a refrigerator will most likely dent your hardwood floors; put down cardboard first.
• when packing your keurig coffee system, make sure the internal (not just the external) reservoir is empty OR be sure to keep the machine upright during transit or you'll flood the little display screen.
• if you've never owned/maintained a lawn, ask for advice before you mow and do permanent damage to your yard (it's probably a good thing that our yard is tiny).

moving: getting rid of our stuff

if the geek and i were more planning-type people who were willing to invest some time and energy, we would have probably scheduled a garage sale or two, posted items for sale on craigslist, that kind of thing.

but we're not.

we'd rather just give stuff away.

we gave a bunch of stuff to the geek's family members, in a spirit similar to our annual white elephant gift exchange. the only difference was that i sorted the things according to what i thought people would actually like (not like the set of french language tapes that kept getting handed off one year) :) these included things such as cooking spices, canned goods, paper goods, unopened bath products, cleaning supplies, a hat box, candles, arts and crafts material, and picture frames.

since we didn't want to deal with trying to sell some of the very large/old/still functional stuff we had, we posted it on craigslist as 'free, but you have to come and get it yourself.' amazingly, things were claimed almost immediately.

the geek's method would be to post the item, then once he received a few inquiries, he'd remove it to avoid a barrage of email. in each listing, the geek included pictures and accurate descriptions (e.g. some scratches, dents).

we posted things like a really old 32" tv, a futon bed/couch, a media console, 20+ random terra cotta pots we had in the storage closet from our failed container garden, an enormous and heavy bedroom set that the geek's parents got in the 70s and did not want back. basically, things that our family and friends didn't need or couldn't transport easily.

thanks to the free price tag, no one complained that something was dinged and everyone was happy and thankful for the item. it was fun to see our things go to new homes rather than to a donation center. sure, the people could very well have turned around and sold the item, but at least they hauled it away for us and said thank you :)

i would like to thank the city of raleigh for offering a 'large item pick-up service' that hauled away the things that we didn't think anyone on craigslist would want (e.g. our old mattress, an old cheap rug). to whoever picked through the pile of stuff we left on the curb and adopted our slightly broken patio umbrella, slightly mossy bench, and some other random large things- hope you like our stuff! (and thanks for leaving a few things so the city didn't waste a trip to our place for nothing!)