Twelve Days Ago

Twelve days ago we moved into our new home.

Before we moved to our current house, we had lived in the same little house for just over eight years, so it had been a while since we’d moved and adjusted to a new place.

And there were a lot of things that I had forgotten about.

You see, I tend to be a bit naive of an optimist. When I thought about moving in to our house, I thought that we would just plop down the boxes, unload everything, put our furniture in place, and be good to go.

Nope.

In actuality, there have been several things that have surprised me about adjusting to a new house. I wouldn’t call them bad surprises. I’m actually really enjoying the process of making our house a home, and all of these things are part of that. But since I was sort of taken aback by some of these changes, I figured that others who are moving would experience them as well, so I thought I’d write them all down as a little “heads up” for people so you can know what to expect much more than I did.

Moving from a house that's "Done" to a house that's "In Progress" is an adjustment

Moving from a house that was pretty much exactly how I wanted it to a totally blank slate was more of an adjustment than I thought it would be. By the time we left the old place I had decorated and organized nearly every inch of our space. I had routines and systems in place and felt like everything ran smoothly and efficiently.

And then we moved.

I love our new house! Love, love it. But there are a lot of unpainted walls, blank spaces, unorganized areas, undecorated rooms, routines that could use some work, etc. And I am so looking forward to working on all of those things as we continue to get settled in, it just surprised me that I’ve kind of missed that “settled” feeling I had in the old place.

You'll have the urge to get everything decorated and done right away. Resit, resist, resist

So if you haven’t figured it out yet, I like order. I like everything to be in its place. I like our spaces to be functional and beautiful. So of course my first instinct when we moved in was to get everything done as quickly as possible. I wanted to organize and decorate all the things, and for some reason naive little me thought that I could do that in the first month we lived here. Haha!

The truth is, it takes time to “get to know” a house. The space is laid out differently, the way you think you’ll use a room may end up being different from how you actually end up using it. The furniture arrangement you thought would be perfect actually isn’t ideal at all, etc. I am a planner for sure, but as much as I planned, there were things we learned from just living in our space that we wouldn’t have been able to figure out any other way.

Because of this, I have tried to resist the urge to furnish and decorate every single room right away. Yes, there were some things that were necessities of course but for the things that aren’t needed now, I’m trying not to make hasty decisions in the name of getting things “done” that I may regret later.

There will be more expenses than you think

At least there were more expenses than I thought there would be. I knew that moving to a new house was going to involve some extra expenses, but I don’t think I foresaw exactly how many. 

A lot of the furniture you have won't fit in the spaces where you need furniture

The furniture situation has been one of the things that has surprised me most! It’s almost comical! We have several furniture pieces that don’t really have a home in the new house, and we also have a lot of blank spaces that could use a piece of furniture; however, none of the extra pieces we have seems to match up with the open spaces that need furniture. Go figure! I see a lot of time spent on Kijiji in my future.

So those are just some of the hings that surprised me most about the move. I hope this post didn’t end up sounding like a rant. I’m so, so grateful for our new house and am loving the process of figuring out the ways to make it work best for us. But since I was surprised by some of these things, I just thought I’d give a heads up to others as well so they would have more realistic expectations than I did.

Lochlan's room is starting to come together