Honeymoon phase:
We've officially been in our new home for a month. ONE MONTH. Moving from our tiny 700 sq. foot apartment to our 1,400 sq. foot house was more of an adjustment that I thought it would be. The walls are still pretty bare. I have four items hung on the walls...tops. Blank walls are a bit overwhelming (also, I don't want to put holes in the pretty painted walls). By the time we left the apartment, 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. Or as best as it could in such a confined space.
And then we moved.
I LOVE our new house! Love, love, LOVE it!! But like I said, 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 apartment.
Fighting the urge:
However, if I'm being honest, my OCD tendencies are struggling to fight the urge to get everything "done" right away. I like order. I like everything in its place. 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. HA!
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– we needed our bed, for example, and a new dryer, so we had to address those needs ASAP– 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.
"Help me, I'm poor":
I knew that moving to a new house was going to involve some extra expenses, but I don’t think I anticipated exactly how many. We had two sets of windows in our apartment... our new house has FIVE. You're probably thinking three extra windows to cover, no biggie. Well, blinds and curtains are expensive! As I mentioned above, we also had to get a new dryer. The one we got with the house needed to be replaced... which I quickly discovered after 4 loads of laundry.
Our new house has doors out to where a deck or patio could be, but no actual deck or patio, so we’ll need to add that ourselves, which will be a fairly large expense. Also, we want to add some sort of fence... at some point. We have barely done any painting yet, but when it comes time for that, that will be another expense.
Little did I know:
Honestly, I thought organizing our new house would be a snap. I had good systems in place in our apartment, so I just thought that I’d do the exact same thing or similar in this house and we’d be good to go… not so much.
These cute baskets worked perfectly in our old apartment…not so much in the house!
There was little room under the sink in the bathroom vanity in the apartment, but we had a decent sized linen closet to store towels and other items. So while the under-the-sink space is larger in this house, it is set up differently. The apartment had six rows of shelves pictured above; the house has two sinks to store items under and also has a few drawers. As a result, the cute little drawer organizers that worked perfectly in the apartment, do not work well in the house.
I could list several more examples, but all this to say, I’m ending up needing to rethink the pieces and systems I use to get organized, which isn’t something I expected to have to do.
I hope this post didn’t end up sounding like a rant. I’m so, so grateful for our house and am LOVING the process of figuring out the ways to make it work best for us! Just sharing some surprises that came my way.
Until next time...
