We’ve been in our new house just over a month now, and it feels like home, but there’s still a lot to do.

We reached a major milestone today, one that feels very satisfying and accomplished, even though it doesn’t make a real obvious difference in our situation — all our stuff is in the house.

Y’see, back when we were just getting started on this whole moving thing, we knew we had to reduce the clutter in our old house by a lot if we ever wanted to sell it. After twenty-two years there, we had a huge amount of stuff — kids’ old toys, extra copies of my books, odd bits of furniture, unused wedding gifts, thousands of comic books, etc. So we started sorting and stashing and tossing. We threw out or donated or sold several carloads of stuff, I sorted and filed my comic books for the first time in fifteen years, and we rented a 10’x10’x10′ storage unit at Public Storage where we started stashing stuff away.

We rented it January 6. It was completely full by the time we put the house on the market, the last week of February — oh, not every single cubic inch, but full enough that when you opened the door you were faced with a solid wall of boxes and furniture extending well above my head.

We moved into the new house on May 21. I took the rear seats out of the mini-van shortly thereafter, and on May 27 I filled the van with the first load of stuff from the storage unit and drove it down here.

Yesterday, June 25, I cleared the last boxes out of storage, took the lock, and informed Public Storage that we were out and wouldn’t be back.

Today I finished unloading the mini-van and put the seats back in for the first time since May. All our stuff is in one place again, here in this house.

That’s amazingly satisfying.

Mind you, there’s still lots to be done — there are stacks of boxes all over the place, we’re eating our meals off a folding card table, our bedroom fan is in a box on my mother’s hope chest rather than mounted on the ceiling, and so on — but everything’s here, it’s not scattered across multiple ZIP codes.

Well, “everything” meaning “everything we have,” not “everything we need” or “everything we want.”

Also, Kiri’s going to be visiting this weekend — for the first time someone besides Julie and myself will sleep here. Another milestone. And she can maybe unpack and sort through some of her stuff.

Speaking of which, I should unpack some of these boxes…