Gathering and Unpacking
Previously, I’ve posted about the trials and tribulations of packing. Finally, after eight long months, I can blog about unpacking! Our closing was at noon on Tuesday, September 12th, and by one we were unloading the 20-foot U-Haul truck we rented the prior Saturday. Unpacking it was so much easier than loading it. When we loaded it on Saturday, we spent hours going up and down three flights of steps at the girl’s apartment. Once those items were loaded, it was onto the storage unit. Twenty feet is a lot of space to fill and by the time we were finished every ounce of my body hurt! I’m 57 years old and I don’t think I ever want to see another set of stairs as long as I live! Thankfully our new house is a Ranch so no stairs there!
Closing Day
We started unpacking the truck around 1:00 pm and by 4:00 pm I knew we would need reinforcement. Luckily, my friends Donna and Bob came to our rescue and the truck was empty by 6:00 pm. This left us time to pick up a second load from our Grand Junction storage unit. Originally, we had hoped to get that unit empty, but we revised out game plan and focused on the larger items. This proved a better strategy, and we were able to return the truck late that evening. By 10:00 pm we were sitting down to dinner in our new home! Thank God for Papa Murphy’s Take and Bake Pizza!
Gathering Boxes
Our Grand Junction storage unit was set to renew on Friday, so our goal was to get it emptied before then and thus close out that account. After teaching the following day, I picked up another load of boxes from the storage unit. When Andy finished work, he took his rental car and together we brought two more carloads of boxes back to the house. While I made dinner, Andy did one more storage unit run. At this point, unpacking had eluded us, we were in the gathering stage.
The Final Gathering
Thursday, I had to head back to Denver to meet the Mayflower Movers on Friday. This process began around 9:00 am and didn’t finish until 5:00 pm. Talk about a long day, they first had to inventory everything and then wrap it all up. I was very appreciative of the care they took at this stage. That said there were a couple of instances that caused me a moment of Déjà vu in that the youngest of the movers was careless and dropped my flat file which was probably one of the heaviest items in storage. Luckily, they were able to get everything into one truck which saved us a few thousand dollars! Professional moving companies like Mayflower charge by weight, verses hour. They will weigh the truck, then after they finish loading, they will reweigh the truck and that second weight is how the calculate the cost to the client.
Unpacking Begins
Saturday, I headed back to Palisade and by early afternoon, I was home and unpacking boxes, mostly in the kitchen. Andy and I made a point of bringing all the artwork and all the boxes marked fragile ourselves. After our first experience with intown movers and their poor work performance we were not taking any chances. Now both storage units on either size of the mountain were empty and we were one step closer to settling in. Tuesday, the movers arrived! It is a much speeder process unloading when you have three guys, plus yourself and your husband. By early afternoon, all our things were off the truck and the movers were on their way back to Denver. Now the unpacking truly began.
By the following Sunday, I had most of the rooms unpacked and functioning as intended. Our art collection and the garages will be the last things I tackle. The artwork I will do slowly as I need to consider each piece and how it will live in our new space. There is a level of creativity to the hanging and placing of artwork that brings me joy, so I want to take my time. The garages are a different story. Right now, both are in total chaos. My goal for them is to organize that chaos. Once that is done, we will at least know where to find things. These two areas won’t truly be unpacked until the home is remodeled. I will leave that endeavor for a future blog post!
As Andy and I settle into our new life in Palisade, I’m sure I will continue to move things around. The mountain of chaos in the garages will become less so and each room and space in the main house will start to function as it should. This is the nature of unpacking and the process of doing it can be either tedious or joyful depending on how you want to approach it, for myself, I’m opting for joyful! Having not seen many of our things for over a year, each day is like Christmas as we ‘unwrap’ the things held in the multitude of boxes!
