How We Survived the First Month

Woah. Ever feel like you’ve been in a whirlwind of life and then emerge from the other side with your hair blown in all sorts of directions, mind spinning, and body exhausted? That’s been us these last few weeks. You’ll have to forgive me for the light posting schedule, but hopefully when the dust settles, we’ll be back to our usual routine here on the blog. 🙂

We’ve been living in the new house for about a month and a half now and I can honestly say… it’s been an adventure. Parts of it have been great, others have been really hard (something I’d like to think through a little more and then I’ll probably put my thoughts into a post). But we’ve made it through the move and I thought it would be fun to let you know how we’ve survived our first month here.

With the last house, there was something in me that thought that everything needed to be painted, cleaned, and “put together” before we moved in. Hah! Little did I know how much of a process it is to turn a house into a home. After all, it took almost three years to get our house looking like it did when we left it! Learning that lesson with the first house has definitely helped shape a more realistic perspective with this one.

We went into our first month in the new house with quite a different strategy. Rather than start a huge to-do list of all of the projects that we needed to get done and dreamed of someday doing, we limited ourselves to accomplish a few things:

1. Make the kitchen workable.
2. Make our bedroom livable.
3. Check off a 3-5 item to-do list every week.

And that, my friends, is how we didn’t go crazy the first month living in this house.

As soon as we moved in, we unpacked the kitchen and got it into working order to limit the “which box are the spatulas in, again?” situations. And the all too tempting scenarios of “this kitchen is just too messy to cook in, let’s order out”. Getting the kitchen together right away really helped make the house feel more like home right off the bat.

The other saving grace (at least mentally) was painting and arranging our bedroom. I won’t spoil the surprise because that’s coming soon in another post, but the bedroom is no longer white and most of the furniture is moved in. Oh, and getting the clothes unpacked and organized in the closet was a major priority. There was just something about walking into a closet with trash bags full of clothes all over the floor that pushed my stress levels through the roof. So we whipped that closet into shape and it made a huge difference!

Having a place to eat and a place to sleep that felt at least a little “finished” was really helpful in making that first month bearable. The other big ticket item for us was carefully monitoring our to-do list to make sure it contained only things that were necessary and would make our lives a little bit easier from week to week. One of the things we held ourselves to was not letting the list grow beyond 3-5 action items. This made it so that by the end of the week, we were able to accomplish pretty much each item we had set out to do, as opposed to having a list that went on and on and just made us feel defeated.

Some of the items on our list for those first few weeks were buying a lawnmower (we have grass to mow now!)…

caulking one of the showers so we could shower (the other is in need of more repairs)…

buying a new hot water heater…

painting the front door the color we wanted so we could then change the locks (stay tuned to see which color we chose!)…

and getting basic things like internet, TV, electricity, water, etc. set up so the house felt more like home.

Breaking such a big job down into smaller parts really helped us to survive the first month and I can’t wait to show you some of the things we’ve tackled so far… namely painting the entire living space! Oh, and even before that… we vlogged our way through the entire moving process, so as soon as I’ve got that video edited, we’ll be showing you that too. Exciting stuff!

Thanks for sticking with us and being patient as we transition into this new chapter… until next time, have a great rest of your day!