We started moving in yesterday and suddenly everything felt real.  We live in Massachusetts now, a world away from our Idaho home.  We bought a timeworn, run-down farmhouse on nine of the most beautiful acres I’ve ever seen.  We can finally begin settling into this new life.  And we have a lot of work to do.

At first, we planned to move everything in one day.  Then, we remembered that there’s only two of us and we have a baby.  So we paid for one more month of storage and opted for a three week, three load plan.  Shortly after coming to this conclusion, another Nor’Easter hit and we got two feet of snow, as if nature wanted to confirm we’d made the right decision.

Plotting out our move into the house has been a bit tricky.  With a plethora of repairs and changes that need to be made before we can really unpack, and limited man-power, we’ve opted for a staged process.  To add to that, the last, human occupants of the house left it four years ago and evidence would suggest that it was more recently inhabited by squirrels and mice.  Ew.

While it is not an insurmountable issue, after doing a bit of homework, we discovered it is one that must be handled with care.  Bleach is our new best friend!  And before putting any of our things in the house, we mixed up some bleach water and scoured the floors, radiators, etc.  For small amounts of poop, a normal bleaching will do.  For larger amounts, such as what we found in the upper level of the barn, a whole different process is required, but we’ll get into that in another post, on another day.  : )

After thoroughly bleaching and de-pooping, Carl unloaded the trailer, sorting boxes by their contents into what will eventually be his study and a guest bedroom.  Tennessee and I hung out in the kitchen, playing and discussing paint colors until her bedtime.  Since we weren’t in the apartment with all her books, I pulled up Robert Service poems on my phone so Sam McGee, Dan McGrew, and I could read her to sleep instead. I love our crumbly, old house and I can’t wait until the day we go out there and just . . . stay.