We did it.

We are now living in our new home, and discovering how much remains to be done. The two living rooms, the kitchen, and the master bedroom are more or less in order, but the rest of the house is still a jumble of misplaced furniture and unopened boxes. We need to buy furniture and fittings — towel bars, draperies, etc.

And my much-larger office needs shelving. We left behind a lot of built-in shelving, and we need to install something here to replace it. IKEA looms large in my future.

But we’re here, and functioning.

Now that we are finally (I hope) nearing the end of the process, I’m looking back and boggling a little.

We’re about to move. Not across country or anything, only about twenty miles, to a house with better amenities that’s closer to my wife’s place of employment.

This has turned out to be a truly massive undertaking, easily more work than writing a novel or two. I hadn’t realized, when we started, just how massive. It’s brought home to me just how complicated modern life is, and how much stuff we have.

I’m sure some readers are asking themselves, “What’s the big deal? I moved not that long ago.” Well, it’s a big deal because we’ve lived here for more than twenty-two years, we’re moving from an expensive area to an even more expensive one, and we don’t have any corporate assistance the way we did last time. We’ve accumulated incredible quantities of material goods in that twenty-two years, and the process involves some large sums of money. We have to worry about utilities that didn’t exist in 1986, such as our broadband internet connection. The regulations and paperwork required are much more extensive than they were in 1986. And we need to sell this house before we can buy the new one because that’s where most of the money is coming from, where in our previous moves we wound up owning two houses for awhile; this turns the whole thing into something of a balancing act, where the entire project depends on someone else’s ability to get a mortgage.

I don’t recall ever before living in a house that was being shown to prospective buyers; I honestly don’t remember how we managed that part before. I know in 1986 IBM was relocating us, so they handled the sale of our farm in Kentucky; did they simply not show the house until after we moved out? I don’t recall. And in 1983, when we put our first house on the market… well, the house must have been shown, I suppose, but I don’t remember it.

In neither case, I’m quite sure, did we have the place in showplace condition for six weeks. It’s exhausting, keeping a house clean and tidy enough to show on ten minutes’ notice for a month and a half. When we finally found a buyer the biggest immediate relief wasn’t that we were going to get a good price and be able to move, but that we could leave a dirty plate in the sink or papers on the kitchen table again.

At any rate, I don’t really have a point to make here; I just thought it was time to say something about the process that’s taken up most of my time since Christmas.

I expect to say more in further posts, after I’ve had time to organize my thoughts a bit — hence the number in the title — but for now I just wanted to get something up. So here it is. More to come.