The Big Move

So this is what happens when you fall two months behind on your blog, all the entries get out of order. No surprise that since our lives have been chaotic the past two months, that our blog would also be in chaos.

I originally hoped we would move to Palo Alto by 8/18 to give us a week to get settled in before Maile started school. But at the start of August, that did not seem likely. We didn't have countertops or floors. So we scheduled our move for 8/21. We wanted to do it on a weekday when the kids were in school. I even asked the Director of the kids' school if they could go all day the day of the move vs half day.

Our move was not going to be typical. We were moving, but we were also going to rent out my family home. It being my family home we had two households of stuff to go through. We decided to close off one room and one large closet but even with those two rooms we wouldn't be able to store everything we'd need to store. So, we arranged to rent a PODS (portable on-demand storage). All month we packed -- stuff to move, stuff to store in the Los Altos house, and stuff to store in a PODS. We pretty much packed everything except our clothes and most of the kitchen.

Our movers had their jobs cut out for them. They had stuff to move to their truck, stuff to move to our PODS, kitchen stuff to pack for the move, and kitchen stuff to store at the house. Everything went fairly smoothly except they had the guy who spoke the least amount of English pack the kitchen stuff, so Hansel ended up having to repack some stuff, which was like finding a needle in a haystack. So now we have 12 wine glasses and 4 drinking glasses.

Even though the movers worked their butts off, they weren't going to be able to complete the move in one day. So that night the kids and I stayed in Los Altos while Hansel worked on getting our bedrooms ready in Palo Alto. We moved in Saturday with no appliances in place, only one working toilet, the only working sink in the kitchen, and no shower doors, but we made it.