Happy Monday and welcome back to me!
I recently moved and it’s been a bit of a whirlwind deciding to sell, staging and selling my house, finding a place to live and all the crazy and changes that come with moving.
I recently had friends over for dinner in our new apartment and one of them looked around and asked, “Oh! Did you choose this place because it feels like a treehouse when you look out this window?”
I laughed.
I “picked” this apartment because it was the ONLY place with the main qualification I was looking for: keep my daughter in the same school.
(OK, so full disclosure: there was also a house for rent in town. for THOUSANDS a month above my budget. umm… no.)
This apartment was not exactly love at first sight.
The showing was rough – it was cramped, stained, cluttered, dark, and the current tenants were there when I went to look at it, so I couldn’t even view one of the bedrooms.
Speaking of bedrooms, it has half the bedrooms I previously had.
Half the square footage overall actually.
That part shouldn’t be a problem, though, I thought. I mean, I literally spent months chronicling my massive decluttering efforts here, even pretending to move at one point.
Why, I’m practically a minimalist! (she said, dripping with sarcastic self-awareness)
It turns out, pretending to move as an emotional exercise and actually.downsizing.fifty.percent.of.your.living/storage space are apparently two different beasts.
But I love a good challenge, and my COVID casualty jobs have not yet returned, so I decluttered and prepped like it was my job.
I gave items to people I thought would truly need/love/want them. I listed so many items on our local swap and sell sites that I had one woman who used to just stop by on her way home from work just to browse what I was putting up that day. I hosted a garage sale. (This time with planning and signs and everything!) I filled my driveway with items and posted “free” notices.
And after a couple weeks of purging,
releasing,
selling
and gifting,
the moving van showed up.
The moving men began packing items and loading the truck, making small talk as they packed.
When one asked where I was moving, and heard it was a two bedroom apartment, they surveyed my inventory and kindly offered to let a few items get “lost” in the move or fall off the truck to help us fit. 😉
Not a great testament to my decluttering efforts.
But I shudder to think of what the process would have been like if I hadn’t started the minimizing process this past March.
So here we are, sitting in our new-to-us home, surrounded by builder’s beige and feeling a little like I’m back where I was 20 years ago, moving into an apartment complex. Except this time I brought a couple kids, a lot more furniture and a slightly different design aesthetic (not that my proudly apple-stenciled kitchen, frog-stenciled bathroom and flower-stenciled bedroom weren’t the height of fashion in the late 90’s).
It’s been a couple weeks since the moving truck left (after it delivered ALL our remaining stuff) and you know what?
I’m falling in love.
Everything is different and a chance to create a space that works for us. And I love creating.
I don’t intend to live here for very long, and when it’s time to leave I want to:
Not spend a lot of time and money returning this place to it’s original state.
-and-
Get my security deposit back.
-and-
I still want it to work for our family and feel like home in the meantime.
So I’m pulling out all the creative solutions I can borrow, copy and dream up to create a functional home we love in the time we’re here, uncovering what really matters and what’s really real along the way.
Follow along for what’s worked, what hasn’t, tips and ideas, before and afters, and lots of messy middles, because that’s where I tend to live (in design, in life, whatever).
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Uncovering Real 