House-hunting While Autistic, Part 4: Moving and Making a Home

This is the fourth in a series about my experience of finding a house.  (Part 1 is here, Part 2 is here, Part 3 is here)  As I'm autistic, the process proved to be a bit more challenging than it would be for most people.  In part 1, I covered why we decided to buy a house and what things we opted to look for, given my disabilities and challenges.  Part 2 describes the actual search process, which proved to be both draining and frustrating.  Part 3 talks about the aftermath of putting an offer down on a home.  This week I'll talk about the actual moving process.

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Moving is one of the most trying experiences I've had the misfortune of having.  It's hard on a person who thrives with habits and familiar things, when all that is taken away.  Yes, the final result is probably worth the effort, but that doesn't make the experience less upsetting while you're in it.  At the time of this writing, moving is still in process, and probably will be for a couple weeks yet, but the bulk of it is done.

Moving is not just the process of taking all your stuff from Point A to Point B.  If it was just that, it would be draining and frustrating.  However, Point A and Point B are usually not identical floor plans.  That means your comfy chair is going to go somewhere not quite as adjacent to your computer, or the extra-sunny window.  And your desk, which formerly had a view out the window at the old place, may now be sequestered in a back corner so that other furniture will fit.

Your essentials, like your toothbrush, shampoo, and basic kitchen supplies, will end up in boxes, and your new bathroom and kitchen won't have exactly the right drawers and cubbies to put things back the right way.  Your bedside table, power strip, and lamp may not be exactly where they were.

For someone who is comforted by the familiar, moving can be roughly described as "hellish."  All your familiar gets thrown into boxes and then dumped out into the new place, and you have to slowly pick up the pieces and establish new familiars.

Chris had suggested, in order to not make the whole ordeal both painful and overwhelming, that we each take a blue plastic tote full of things to the new place, once a day, for a minimum.  This was a pretty good idea, as it made things more bite-sized rather than "well, this entire kitchen needs to go... right now..."

Two of these have gone from the old apartment to the new condo every day since Saturday the 17th of February. 

In most cases, I took more things than just what would fit in that blue plastic tub, but having the minimum settled made it more okay for me to just throw up my hands and say "screw it, this is good enough."  And it also made me feel better about myself when I grabbed just a few extra things.  So that was a very positive strategy.

A normal carload for most days: a tote full of stuff, plus 1-2 extra things. 

I do have to stress that it's an unusual one, though.  Our apartment complex insisted on 60 days' notice before we could move out.  (The state minimum is 30, and mostly that's standard.)  So we ended up paying a lot more rent than would be normal, and having the apartment for a lot longer than would be normal.  In most moves I've been a part of, you needed to get your stuff out of there in a hurry.  So you got a ton of boxes and hired movers and packed what you could before they arrived, and then they took all your stuff and dumped it in the new place, and you spent the next year unpacking it all.

We were able to do the moving process over a longer period of time because of the apartment complex's greediness.  So I guess that's not all bad.  Moving the stuff ourselves makes it a bit more manageable in some ways.  Then, too, the place is large enough to literally just dump those blue plastic totes out in a corner or something, and then go back the next day without putting everything away.  Which we have done, and quite a bit.  It'll be a mess to sort it all, but I'll also get a chance to prune some of the stuff I've accumulated.

In addition to the piles of stuff, we also went looking for furniture with which to populate our new home with...  Starting with this thing, which I have dubbed The Monster. 

This is an 8 foot by 4 foot conference table.  It was extremely inexpensive, and you can probably see why. 

This is my spouse sitting at The Monster.  He wanted a conference table to serve us both as a computer desk.  

I was dubious... but it actually does work pretty well.  Our computers are diagonal from each other. 

The Monster isn't the only piece of furniture we welcomed into our home.  At my urging, we put together a list of furniture we wanted, and then Chris hunted down a list of secondhand stores for hopefully acquiring those things. 

Nameless corner entertainment center-thingie, found at the Habitat for Humanity ReStore.  The TV barely fits in there, but it does!

Not just a recliner.  A blue recliner!  Chris settled into this at a furniture store and promptly decided he needed a nap.  I laid claim to it after that, and it's now mine.  : 3

But that's okay, because this thing, Couchlet, is his.  Minus the change someone left there, anyway.  It's very comfortable, and we paid a good bit of money for it despite its mud-brown hue. 

Together, they form the Relaxation Station.  Both sides have windows to look out of, too. 

This isn't a new piece of furniture, it's an old one that's been somewhat repurposed to sit in the Relaxation Station.  Tea and hot cocoa for everyone!  And other essentials below, such as crafting materials, my supplements, and some scented candles. 

The exercise bike made it as well, and gets dragged around the basement as the whim takes me.  Mostly it sits by the window, but I tend to use it next to the computer. 

Chris bashed his head on this light one too many times... so in lieu of a carabiner, this was what we had to raise it higher. 

We've mostly adhered to the 1 tote a day per person rule, but sadly one day had to be an exception... we needed to take the bed, most of the bathroom stuff, the kitchen stuff, and our computers all on the same day so that we could start living in the new place.  It ended up taking most of the day to do it, and even then, we didn't actually manage all the parts of the kitchen we'd wanted to.  I was kind of a wreck by the end of the day, too, which did not help matters in the slightest.

In addition to the actual packing and the furniture shopping, we've made trips to various department stores and grocery stores in search of home-making supplies.  Roll-y mats for under our computer chairs (so the chairs don't wreck the carpet), floor mats for the various entrances, bathroom cleaning supplies, soaps for each bathroom, more trash cans for the various rooms in the house, etc.  It's not something I gave a lot of thought to when we finally closed on the house, but it became more obvious once we started using those areas.

This coming Monday, the last of the furniture is going to make its way here by way of a local moving company, which should settle basically everything.  There isn't much left, thankfully, so this won't be too expensive... but it is unfortunately mandatory because our chest freezer is far too heavy to move by ourselves.  When we bought it and had it shipped, it took two burly men strapped into harnesses to bring the ridiculous thing up the stairs.  Short of heaving it over the side of the deck, I don't think we're getting it back down again without help.  So the freezer, the dining room table, the guest bed, and my poor man's bookshelves will be taken by the movers.  We'll also toss a couple pieces of furniture (my old ratty computer desk and a viciously heavy and mostly broken entertainment center) rather than bringing them.  No sense bringing things we don't want to our new home.

All in all, the sheer amount of time and energy poured into this endeavor has cost me a lot of sanity and energy, and the moving in process will continue long after next week is over with.  The 16th of this month is when we have to be out, officially.  But we'll be re-arranging and organizing, and I'll be pruning my stuff for months, probably.  

It'll be worth it.  I just need to manage to keep putting one foot in front of the other 'til this is over...

In the meantime, the view out the back windows is nice.