Countdown to the Switcherooo

You know our move out of Tracy’s house into the Airstream was bumpy because it was right when Covid started. Of course, this move out of the Airstream into a sticks and bricks is looking also to be a long and windy road. We have experience with long and windy roads, though. (Yes, pun actually intended.)

House Hunt

We have not found a house, yet. The deal is that the house we want is one of a very small set. In a specific urban area, but not on a busy street. With off-street parking (rare), with two bathrooms (rare), with a backyard (not really rare, but that has knocked some off the list). We know this house is out there, but the wait for it to come on the market might be a while.

We started off being shown two to three houses a week and now we might see one a week. You know me, I fall in love with every single house whether it meets our criteria or not; for each one I’m scheming how to make it work. I’m taking pictures, making notes, sending the listing to friends for their opinions. You know Tracy: he is patient and on-task, looking for the right house.

I can hear it in his voice as we’re touring a house just when he figures out it’s a No. That’s when I stop my scheming and just listen to our agent (he hasn’t yet learned to catch the change in Tracy’s voice, but he’s good, I know he will), and I file all that he says into the large folder in my heart labeled, “Houses We Don’t Want.” Because, if Tracy doesn’t want it, I don’t want it. (Don’t forget, the entire situation here is thanks to Tracy’s attitude: “If Shelly can’t stay on the road, I can’t stay on the road.”)

So, no house yet, and soon nowhere to live, so we did get an apartment. We signed our lease after a small bit of rigmarole around no (immediately) prior domicile address, then add in some unnecessary paperwork about proof of income (what, they’ve never had an applicant who’s retired without a paycheck?), and the fact that the complex offers one guaranteed parking space per tenant, but it’s in their parking garage that our truck can’t fit in. All dealt with.

Our Storage Unit Keeps Filling Up

Our move from the Airstream to the apartment is being planned like one of those complex heists in the movies. It goes something like this.

We’ve been moving stuff from the Airstream to our storage unit, plus putting furniture and accouterments in storage that we’re buying for the apartment. (My last purchase was a used plastic laundry basket for $2.50, which only I could be excited over. You’d never believe how hard it is to sort laundry in a bag that’s set up to be worn as a backpack. Now I can deal with clothes horizontally instead of vertically. Lowercase woohoo!)

As for things we already own going into storage: now’s the time to differentiate. Everything that’s in the trailer now will go into the apartment, with nothing else going into storage unless we want it to stay there all winter.

Frankly, as I’ve been sorting through my stuff, it’s hard to think of “winter” things and “summer” things, seeing as how weather has been non-seasonal for the past five years for us. As in, Yukon demanded winter clothes in the summer and the Keys summer clothes in the winter. Our entire time on the road has been like that. We’ll get the hang of seasons, again, though, whether we want to or not.

The real question is: How do we have so much stuff in our storage unit in the first place? We have more boxes of stuff than I thought we owned, even counting what we’d been storing in and on top of the truck. I mean, heck, we still have an Airstream full of things we own. I guess that shows how much stuff you can shove in a trailer and a truck with learned skill.

Go Team Move

Okay, here’s the moving plan, which was the point of this post.

Buy a cheap mattress in a box, get it shipped to the house of local friends. Put it in the storage unit (because there’s nowhere else for it to go.)

Day of apartment lease start: move mattress in, and move as much in from the Airstream that we can box up and move in one day. Stay our final night in the trailer while the mattress unfolds and airs out in the apartment.

Day 2 of lease: Move everything left that’s “not nailed down” from the Airstream into the apartment, plus, some furniture from storage. Sleep our first night in our new, temporary sticks and bricks. Try not to freak out.

Next few days: We strip the Airstream of everything we put in it that we want to keep, such as a lot of electronics that Tracy will have to de-install.

Saying goodbye day: Once the trailer is completely empty and back to basics, we hitch her up for the final time. Mixed feelings there, because you know how I feel about hitching up day! I will probably screw it up royally. We’ll tow to a lot (that’s cheaper than our current campground) and leave it there for insurance to come take it away at their convenience. ::SOB:: What a weird day that will be.

Finally, we move furniture from storage into the apartment (with the help of one person we need for the BRC—big red couch—TBD on that), get it set up for the next six months, and prepare mentally for a winter like neither of us has lived through since the 1990s, when Tracy lived here and I lived in Montana. We can do it!

Three weeks to go before the apartment lease starts. In the meantime, we’re looking at houses, going to even more estate sales and thrift shops, seeing our new doctors and dentists, and enjoying our final summer in a campground, where we can step outside directly into the sound of cicadas.