The first week in our new place was an “adventure,” and not what we expected at all. The day before we were supposed to move into our condo, Joe and I went there to clean it. What we thought was going to take a couple hours, ended up being an all-day / all-night affair. There was just SO much dust, dirt, rubble, and paint splatters left behind from the renovation. It was as if every surface was covered in a layer of dusty film. But on top of that, we both had colds and were already exhausted from battling our constant coughing and runny noses in between all the scrubbing.
It took us about 8 hours to finish the job! Then I made instant ramen as our first meal in our new home. We used our Keurig coffee maker box as our dining room table, and plopped down on the floor together to eat our dinner. Then we went back to Joe’s parents’ house, where we were staying.
The next morning, the professional movers came, but since they charged by the hour, Joe and I loaded the truck with them. And when we got to our new place, we told them to just drop the boxes “anywhere” in the living room, in order to save some time and money. All the while, Joe’s cold morphed into flu-like symptoms, and he started suffering from body aches, and head congestion.
I think Joe’s illness got to him because he accidentally locked us out of our place that first night when we stepped out to pick up dinner for my birthday. Yes…it was my BIRTHDAY. So we unpacked for a while and decided to run out and get something to eat when we got locked out. We realized only after Joe tried to unlock our garage door that he didn’t have his keys. That meant we didn’t have our car keys either.
It was around 8:00pm at this point and we were dirty, tired, sick, and hungry. But instead of eating, relaxing, and celebrating my birthday, we ended up being stuck on our cold hallway steps, waiting for Joe’s parents to come and rescue us in the middle of the night! Joe felt so bad for them and for me. I was just glad that we didn’t make it all the way outside before we realized because it was around 20 degrees that day.
The next day, as I started to unpack our boxes, our living room turned into this hot mess. I couldn’t open just one box at a time like a normal person because when we moved out of California, we had no time to be organized packers, so things were just thrown in anywhere.
Joe focused his attention on setting up and organizing his office first because we knew we had to get back to work as soon as possible.
As for me, I dug out our coffee pods, mugs, and Keurig machine first before anything else! Having my morning coffee was super important. It made me feel more comfortable in our new place, and it was fuel before I had to attend to the chaos.
Then one day, as I was unpacking as usual, I heard a peculiar high-pitched squeal. At first I thought it was a kid running around in the hallway screaming. Then I heard some clanging coming from the inside of our apartment mixed with the squealing. Yeah… you know what I’m about to say next…
I turned my head to see a MOUSE in the HOUSE! I almost fainted when I saw it scurry over a box in a flash. At first I thought I was hallucinating. Joe tried to convince me that I was too. But I forced him to search the boxes one at a time. Then when Joe saw the little guy sitting in the corner of one of our food boxes, he jumped back and almost fainted too. I screamed, “I TOLD YOU SO” as he grabbed the entire box and scrambled down the main hallway stairs to take it outside.
But just as Joe reached the main front door, the mouse jumped out of the box and I heard a “thud” as Joe panicked and dropped the box. The mouse scurried around the main hallway and I threw Joe a dish towel from the top of the stairs. He started chasing it around with this little towel and I had to try not to bust out laughing as I watched the mouse run, and then Joe run after it like a Tom and Jerry cartoon. Back and forth they went up and down the hallway until he finally shooed it out of the main door.
Turns out because our boxes were sitting in Joe’s parents’ garage for 4 months, during the harsh frigid winter, this stowaway found refuge in one of our boxes and we brought him here with us. Trust me, I was shaking and paranoid for the rest of the week, afraid that I would find a whole family of mice somewhere, but luckily, it was just that one.
So life continued as normal. And Joe screwed in the pull-out shelves of the pantry first. I was afraid of attracting any other creepy crawler by our food. I wanted to get the perishables tucked away and off the counters as soon as possible.
And we assembled our trusty metal racks next so that we could get our dishes and cooking equipment off the ground and stored away easily.
But then our downstairs neighbor told us that there was backup in their sink when we turned on our kitchen faucet. We thought that was weird. So a plumber was brought in and it turned out the problem wasn’t us. A huge pipe was broken underneath the ground of the entire building, and the backup was coming from the dirt and gravel from the ground! So it became a huge ordeal. Plumbers were in and out of our place constantly, to check out the pipes, and do some high pressure deep cleaning. And we couldn’t use our kitchen sink.
Then they had to bring in a jackhammer and tear through the floor and concrete of our downstairs neighbor’s place, so some days we were told to evacuate for about 9 hours and not to flush our toilets or use any water at all. Yeah, that was fun.
All of this flu, locked out of our place, non-happy birthday, mouse in the house, and plumbing problem nonsense led us to ignore other minor but important issues, such as covering our windows. I’m sure our neighbors could watch our every move and I felt so exposed. So we finally took the time to do things like that.
And with our curtains hung and office set up, we settled into our place and eventually got back to work! It felt nice to wake up and not trip over boxes, or hear a jackhammer. After we were sure we were mouse free and able to use our water again, we were able to relax and appreciate that we were finally home.
