Packing Progress on Flanders Street

We spent last weekend packing our books and breaking down bookcases. By Sunday I was pretty tired and a little sore, but it was great to make such great progress. We have a few more book boxes to pack toward the end, but for the most part, they're ready to go.  As you can see, packing with a toddler makes for all kinds of spectacular chaos. All of those things that you normally keep out of reach on nice tall bookcases begin to spread around the house on any horizontal surface more than three feet high.

I also started packing up the kitchen, which is probably about half-way finished. We'll leave the necessities until the very last few days, but everything else will get wrapped, taped, and shoved in the corner of our living room where the Billy bookcases used to live. Little still has all of his toys at his disposal, but just give me a few days and some of those will start to get boxed up as well. He'll have to live like a pioneer baby with just a stick and a ball of string to occupy his time. Not that he really cares about his toys anyway, with screwdrivers, hammers, rolls of packing tape, and cardboard boxes at his disposal. 

He's taken to "decorating" our boxes as we pack. He calls it "art" and "painting". I call it graffiti. At least it keeps him from smashing all of the dishes on the floor. It gives him much pride to examine his masterpiece. He holds up his marker with a giant grin and says "did it! YAY!" I think the moving process is a little exciting for him, but also confusing. He walks around the apartment and says "house?" And I confirm that we are moving to that house we went to see several times and then he says "Matt?" (our real estate agent). I then explain that, yes, Matt will sometimes come to visit. And he nods and says "yep," as if he has it all figured out. It's amazing how much he understands at only 19-months (or at least he's really good at pretending). 


Only 21 more days until we close on the house. I can't wait.

Things I Will Not Miss (Portland Edition) #1: Blitz Bar

More specifically, Blitz Bar and their goddamn party bus that parks below our dining room window. I don't have anything against Blitz Bar, except for the fact that they opened a new location right next to our apartment -- only a few paces from our bedrooms. It changed the block, and not in a good way. We decided in December that we needed to get the heck out of here before its warm enough to open the windows (and before the drunken hoards take over the sidewalk for the summer season). God, I sound like a cranky old man (as I shake my fist out the window). 


The fact of the matter is that we've outgrown our space here on Flanders Street and we've also outgrown our neighborhood. So, we're trading in Blitz Bar and Pizza Schmitza's horrendous karaoke Thursdays for a Whole Foods and public library branch. And while we're definitely trading up, there are some things that we're going to lose. There are a lot of things about NW that I will miss a lot.

One More Move

Hopefully this will be the last one for a while. Our last move in Portland was just a few blocks down the road and we didn't have a ton of stuff. Now we have an entire basement storage unit full of baby stuff, twice as much furniture, and oh yeah, a 19-month-old who squeals with delight at the sight of boxes. 

Packing for this move should be interesting. We can't just start piling things up to the ceiling, because Mr. Little is a climber. It's going to be a careful game of rearranging, staging, and storing our stuff until we close on April 11th. Eek! That's just three and a half weeks away. Finding space to put boxes has been tricky, which is why we put Little to work disassembling a few bookcases. He's been very "helpful" as we start the packing process. It's pretty amazing to see him learn to use a screwdriver, but it takes about three times as long to get the job done.

I ordered our first round of boxes and will pick them up today. This weekend we are going to start packing up our books. They'll get boxed and stacked in the new empty space we've created. Prioritizing the things we'll need in the next three weeks will be key. And I assume there will be one last frenzied push as the end date nears to get things organized and move-ready. We will also have to make a little extra time to do some of our favorite things in the neighborhood before we leave. Of course, we're only moving across town, so it's not like we will never venture into NW again. But I imagine we will find new favorite spots in the new neighborhood and will see a lot less of the place that we have called home for the last four years.


Exciting (and hectic) times ahead!

More Space

In just under a month (provided all goes as planned) we will be homeowners! It's been a grueling two months of looking, and bidding, and hoping. Everyone keeps saying that it's a buyer's market, well, clearly they've not tried to buy a house recently in Portland. Inventory is super low, which makes the market a frenzied feeding fest on any decent house that pops up on the market in the close-in areas. This is the third house we bid on, and by far, the best. I can't wait to call it home.