Moving, part 2

Okay, so my attempt at writing more frequently isn't off to a good start, but this time I have a good excuse-- my computer is sitting on the floor, and that isn't very ergonomically correct. Why is it on the floor? Because this weekend we took apart the desk that it normally sits on and took it to the new apartment.

Hard to believe that it was only a summer ago that we first moved from our cramped, 400-sq-ft 1-bedroom apartment in family student housing (which was built in the 1950s) to the spacious, modern, 750-sq-ft 1-bedroom apartment (built in 2003) near work. I blogged about it here not long after we moved in. It was exciting to be able to stretch out in our new place and have room to move about it, especially in the kitchen!

Since then, Todd grew and we added a twin bed to the bedroom, moving the queen bed closer to the wall to make room for it. Other than that, the original layout has changed little.

After a while, though, things started feeling cramped again, and after resigning ourselves to waiting a while longer so we could save up more money after our toe-dipping into the house-buying pond, we decided we might as well stretch out a little more and upgrade to a 2-bedroom in the same complex. We ended up scoring a really nice deal on a unit that's in the building right next to ours. According to Allan, the front doors are only 100 steps apart.

This marks our 5th in-town move together, and as we always do with such moves, our leases overlap by about a week or so, allowing us to gradually move into the new place-- taking a few boxes of things from the current place to the new place, and then bringing the handful of empty boxes back to be reused for the next trip. It's really convenient to be able to spread out the moving in several short trips-- and it's handy not to have to hunt around for dozens of moving boxes. It also makes the rest of the move cheaper-- for when we hire movers to move our big furniture, that's ALL they are moving (no boxes of little stuff) and it goes much faster.

We spent this weekend hauling stuff over. All the desks are at the new place. Half the clothes and almost half the books are, too. A few more storage boxes and the rest of the books and other odds and ends lying around the house and we'll soon be ready for the movers to haul our beds, TV, bookshelves and washer & dryer from one building to the next.

And, as we always do with our moves, we take the measurements of the floorplan of the new place and then arrange our furniture on it to best optimize the space. Last year I discovered we could do it online instead of painstakingly drawing it out on graph paper. This year I discovered that you could simply upload a picture of the floorplan, set its scale and stick furniture on that image. Here is our current plan for laying out the furniture in our new place (as you can tell from comparing it to the old one, we've since acquired a dining table and are expecting delivery of a new couch and extra bookshelf tomorrow):



Click on the image for a larger view.

Oh yes, and THIS time, I finally managed to take pictures of the apartment empty. Now I just have to take pics of the place when we're all settled in, and I can post a before-and-after series.