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| Howard Buford Recreation Area, May 28. |
We’re in the middle of a long goodbye. If the current timeline holds, we’ll be moving to a new house in midsummer. We’ve lived in our present house for over 35 years, and there are many things we love about it, this property, and this neighborhood. But there are also many things that have grown stale for us, that are irritating and frustrating, that we flat out don’t like. We are eager for a fresh start, a new environment, a big challenge. The new house is different in almost every way from the one we live in now. It’s on a quieter street, in a quieter neighborhood. The house itself you could call “fancy” compared to our humble Craftsman bungalow. We’ll have to grow into its mid-century modern vibe for sure. This is not exactly the “downsizing” move we imagined back in March when we first started looking at properties, but it feels right for this stage in our lives. We can downsize later! And for this impending move, we have a big opportunity to jettison a lot of stuff that no longer serves us or “brings us joy.” So there will be a lightening of our load at least, almost automatically.
We are fortunate in that we don’t have to vacate our current house simultaneously to moving to the new house. We can take as long as we want, moving by carload for much of our stuff, rather than by moving van. We’ll need to get help for large items, of course, but I imagine maybe 2-3 weeks of moving boxes and smaller stuff, taking our time arranging and fitting into the new place. We'll also probably want to buy some new things, like rugs and furniture items. Then ultimately we’ll move the last of our stuff over, bring the cats, and start living at the new place. Then will be the job of selling the old house! We’re not going to do much fixing up here. In general, it’s a good house that we’ve done a lot for in terms of remodeling, re-roofing, major repairs, and such. But it’s got our 35 years of being well-lived-in, and the normal wear-and-tear that goes along with that span of occupied time. We’ll probably leave it to new owners to do things like paint and replace upstairs carpet, etc. In my imagination, we will sell it to people who are excited about getting a cool funky house in a cool funky neighborhood, with energy to put into the house and property to make it their own.
