We are sprinting toward the finish line in our race to get out of our condo.  The closing on both our condo and our new house are scheduled for Wednesday, and our house is currently a wreck with boxes piled in every available corner.  The bunny is residing in our friend’s storage shed until later this week, and Stoli gets to stay the night on Tuesday night at his own personal kitty camp at the Pet Lodge.  The Pet Lodge offers 24/7 webcam access to your pet, just in case the details of our move aren’t enough to keep us occupied this week.  Tonight we take our houseplants to a friend’s house in Hinesburg, and our kayaks have been loaned out to friends for the weekend.  Yesterday we donated a ton of stuff to Recycle North.  I also intended to donate a can of formula that I got in the mail before Holden was born, but the food shelf hours weren’t convenient, so I ended up chucking it, which I now feel guilty about.  We are in the agonizing stage of  “Will we REALLY need access to this spatula before Wednesday??” and “Maybe I can keep wearing these same dirty clothes so I have less laundry to wash….”  And so, we have entered the purgatory of moving.

Tomorrow we have an inspection by the Department of Public Works to close out open zoning permits that our builder never took care of.  We have our fingers crossed that everything checks out and we can proceed as planned.  I also have to run to the bank and hope all of our condo checks have cleared so I can transfer the account balance to the other owners.  Those are the last big items on our seemingly never-ending list of house-related tasks.  This is our third house sale and fourth house purchase since 2002.  We have gotten to be pros at moving but somehow every transaction has brought forth a host of new issues.

One of the easier moves was when we bought our first condo and moved from MD to VT in 2002.  Yes, that was one of the easiest moves, even though it was an out-of-state transition.  We didn’t have to worry about selling a property and didn’t have to move much stuff as we owned next to nothing— prior to moving to VT, we were living in a one-bedroom apartment in northern Baltimore County.

And when we finally re-located to VT, we purchased a basement level 2-bedroom condominium that was pretty much the exemplar of budget living.  Or as Chuck Palahniuk would say, it was a filing cabinet for widows and young professionals.  Our particular drawer was located on the bottom left:

We had a kitchen with no dishwasher (you should have seen these cabinets before I painted them and replaced the hardware):

Our little living room (once when we had a TV!):

And our office:

While we lived there, we did some small updates.  One of our projects was a bathroom re-model:

During the two years we lived there, we survived a flood and a disgusting septic back-up.  The flood was a direct result of the negligence of someone who owned a unit above us.  They turned off the heat and left the windows open DURING THE WINTER…not smart during  -20F weather.  The pipes froze and burst, and we came home to find all of our carpet ruined.  We lived on concrete floors in a basement condo for 3 months during our first VT winter.  A few months after the new carpet was installed, the condo association “forgot” to pump the septic, and guess whose condo had a bathtub full of poo??  Not only did we have a bathtub full of poo, but it overflowed and ruined the new carpet!!  So then we had to get new carpet, AGAIN.  Other than that (and perhaps the fact that we’d get calls from tenants about stuff and we had to deal with coin-op laundry, it wasn’t a bad place to live).

In 2004, I switched graduate programs unexpectedly because my graduate advisor was leaving the institution at which I started my studies.  R had a good gig going at his job where he remains to this day, so we decided to live halfway in between my new school and his work so we could both have a shot at pursuing the professional opportunities that were important to us.  We purchased a house in central Vermont, which was our favorite place we have lived to date:

We did a lot of work to that house.  When we first moved in, it smelled like urine and was generally pretty gross.  It even had mushrooms growing out of the bathroom floor.  It was the definition of a fixer-upper.  During the two years we lived there, we re-modeled the bathroom, painted EVERYTHING, pulled up nasty carpet, put in new floors, installed new ceiling fans and light fixtures, and more.  It still needed a ton of work when we moved out, but it had become a wonderful home for us and we loved living there very much.

The before shot of the master bedroom during our inspection:

The after shots of my painting and decorating magic (I admit that the adhesive glow-in-the-dark stars and planets with which the previous owner’s children had adorned our ceiling were very endearing, so I decided to let them remain over us as we slept for the 2 years we lived there):

The before shot of the dining room/kitchen (and our house inspector who later tragically fell off a roof and broke his back):

The countertops were in bad shape:

Luckily, my Dad came to the rescue and showed Rob how to re-finish the countertops:

Here’s Rob getting high on adhesive fumes:

The finished product looked damn good!:

And the dining room didn’t look half bad either:

Oh, but the projects in that house never seemed to end.  Here I am, foolishly pulling up urine-soaked carpet without a mask.  Guess who got hives from this experience:

I also became acquainted with crowbars:

But man, it looked better when it was done:

I also did a lot of painting.  A lot.

The before shot of the office (notice that this is a child’s room and there is a rifle on one of the children’s beds—classy!):

The after shot of the office:

We had so many good times in that house.  We had visits from many wonderful out-of-town guests.  Here is my oldest friend Deborah, pretending to be a sinister librarian:

Mark and John came for a visit as well:

And we always managed to lock ourselves out on the patio, which necessitated Rob and John hoisting Mark onto the screened in porch to get us back inside.  And of course, who could forget Stoli escaping through the hole in the screened in porch, causing Rob to scale the side of the house (in flip flops, while intoxicated), resulting in him falling onto the tomato plants below and taking the rake and lawn mower down with him.  Fun times were had there….

Of course, there were some no-so-fun times….like another incident involving poo!!!  A week after we moved in, the city sewer lines backed up into our basement.  The basement was finished at the time (poorly, I might add), but we ended up losing all of the carpet and about a foot of drywall around the perimeter of the room.  Instead of re-finishing the basement (which is a poor choice in New England anyway), we used the insurance money to transform our mushroom-infested bathroom into this (believe me, you don’t want to see the before shot—it was like the worst bathroom in Scotland):

We also had another strange thing happen, when a car parked in a neighboring driveway drifted down the hill and hit our house (no one was behind the wheel when this happened).  The house was mostly OK, except for the main electrical wiring coming into the house:

But believe me, I am telling the truth when I say we really and truly LOVED living there.

So, it was really and truly unfortunate then, that  I had to spend much of the last year we were there, living in a small room down by school because my 120-mile roundtrip commute was really taking its toll on my ability to finish my dissertation.  Rob and I spent months apart (except for occasional weekends), and although we loved loved loved our little home, we decided that once school was done, we would need to be closer to work.  After I finished up school, I took a postdoc/teaching position at the local university close to Rob’s job.  We could once again work in the same town and live together, without the stresses of a long commute.  Our move out of our home in central Vermont was not smooth to say the least, and due to a severe miscommunication, all of our stuff was boxed up and on the moving truck, and we were unable to close on our new condo for 2 whole weeks.  We had to find a place to crash for 2 weeks, and poor Stoli just couldn’t understand why we had to leave him behind in an empty house:

At first, the excitement of living together again and not having to spend like $500/month on gas superseded the disadvantages of moving back into a condo.  We were mostly relieved to find a place that we could afford that woudn’t need 50K worth of work right off the bat.

We truly were excited in the beginning:

But how could we have anticipated that we would FINALLY have a little Holden running up and down this hallway just a couple years after moving in??

And how could we anticipate that our neighbor would loathe said running up and down the hallway so much??

I hope that our new home will be a place of peace for us, where we can enjoy each other’s company, laugh with each other, have good times with friends and family, savor delicious food (and maybe even sleep through the night here and there).  Although I know from past experience that more poo-filled adventures could be in our future, I mostly just want safety and peace for our family.  I used to think that sewage back-ups and floods were spates of awful luck for us (and perhaps they were); however, I now think I’d rather deal with 10 more such incidents in place of feeling like Holden cannot be himself in his own home.  I feel for all of the parents out there who are renting in less-than-stellar neighborhoods or who are not making enough money to move and get their kids away from unsavory situations (and I’m talking environments that are way worse than where we live, of course).  I cannot imagine the helplessness that must engender.  I know how lucky we are.  We are so, so lucky.  Privilege is really about being able to change your circumstances at will.

In just a few short days, the moving truck will be here, precariously backed between our house and our neighbors.  Our belongings will be loaded onto the truck and shuttled off to another physical space that we will inhabit for several years, a space within a suburban neighborhood that is detached physically from other homes but ironically does not foster the sense of alienation that we have felt while living so close to so many other people.

We are moving away from everything to feel more connected.