Okay, we have owned our house for two days now and have been unable to move into it. We are very hopeful that today will be the magic day and we will be able to get into the house. Jen is on her way to Irving with a moving van full of her stuff so if we are not out of her way before she arrives we are going to have some problems of logistics.
Brian, Dominica and I tried hard to strategize this morning as to how the moving was going to work. Should we borrow someone’s truck? Not enough time. Should we rent one? Okay, but that is expensive and we are very sick and can’t really handle doing any moving. What to do.
Then I remember a little orange business card that had, months ago, been taped to our front door. I had taken it off and taped it right beside the inside of the door. I walked over and there it was. Dr. Move. Sounds like it might be time to call.
I was able to get right through to Dr. Move. Their rates sounded really cheap and when I asked what lead time they needed they said “about a week.” I said “How about a few hours?” She laughed. She said “How about two o’clock.” Awesome. We have movers and a truck. That was easy.
I worked as much as I could today. We did some packing trying to get ready for the movers. Not very much warning for us to get the house in order for a real moving crew. It is going to be extra difficult with so many people here and stuff in the way. There is a certain ease to moving “everything” rather than just this thing and that thing selectively.
The movers arrived with the twenty foot trailer at a quarter till three. It didn’t take them too long to pack up the apartment. There really was not that much to go. The big furniture, the bed, the dresser, some boxes, etc. It was awesome watching other people load up all of that stuff. Each load representing a bunch of effort that we did not have to put in ourselves.
Once the apartment was done Brian and I led the movers over to the storage unit where they packed up as much as they could get which was probably about a third to maybe a half of the storage unit. A pretty good chunk representing almost all of the furniture and odd items. Mostly what is left is the book boxes and miscellaneous other boxes.
Then we drove up to the house, unfortunately during rush hour, so that the movers could unload the absolutely packed twenty foot trailer up there. Rush hour turned the fifteen minute trip into forty five minutes, easily.
The unloading went very quickly and our stuff was into the house in no time. Dominica had beaten us to the house and was directing where everything was to go. She had to get up there by four so that she could meet the Verizon FiOS installer. She was very, very happy to discover that our water was turned on when she arrived. What a great feeling to have almost everything done in a single shot. This was a great decision.
The movers wrapped up around seven in the evening. We had been talking about having them do a second trip but they didn’t have headlights and it was dark so they declined to keep working tonight. They said that there should be people available tomorrow so that we could just call in tomorrow morning and schedule movers at that time.
Verizon wrapped up the FiOS installation before the move in was complete. We are so excited to have great Internet access again. We were so spoiled in Peekskill with Cablevision’s Optimum Online and then going to AT&T in Irving was just a disaster. I tested our FiOS over the wireless and immediately got 48Mb/s down and 28Mb/s up. Pretty awesome. This is the fastest that we have ever had for Internet access. And only twenty four milliseconds of latency according to SpeedTest. Sweet. I am going to really enjoy working from this house.
Dominica immediately got on the laundry. That has been driving us crazy all week not being able to do laundry.
This evening, after doing five loads of laundry while we worked to try to go through as many containers as possible to get stuff ready for tomorrow when we will need the bins to get more random stuff out of the apartment as we find it, Dominica stepped up to the washer and felt a wet “squich” beneath her feet. Quickly we discovered that there was water all over the floor. Apparently something is wrong with the washing machine.
The washing machine is very old, as is the dryer and basically all of the other appliances, so for it to have rusted out and flooded is not that much of a surprise. But boy is this crappy. We were desperate to do laundry and now have to wait a while longer to do it again and we have to deal with wet floors. No fun.
We ordered in dinner from Angelo & Vito’s. It was awesome to discover that they deliver. They have really good pizza – like you would expect in New York or Geneseo, at least. We will be getting pizza from there a bit, I am guessing. They are very friendly too although they had a bit of a problem finding our house. Carrollton is very confusing to get around. Everyone was over for dinner tonight – Watson, Souder, Tara, Jen and all of us. Now that we have water, we have the house to be in.
We kept working all evening on unpacking. Getting the bed setup being the big item. We also discovered that the floors were far more wet than we had thought. The flooding was not localized to the laundry “room” but had gone all through the hallway, into the master bedroom and totally flooded both master closets. All of this space being carpeted, of course. Now we have a real problem.
We took out both of our “Little Green” floor cleaners, thank goodness that we own those, and Dominica and I put in some serious time attempting to suck any water that we could out of the floor. What a way to spend our first night in the new house. We could have gotten so much more unpacking and setup done if we were not focused on this. And Liesl’s room is completely useless because it is packed with our laundry just sitting all over waiting for there to be a washing machine that we can use to wash it all.
After we sucked out all of the water that we could I brought in our dehumidifier and set it up to dry the area as much as possible. It is going to take a long time to get this much water out of the floor.
Tomorrow we need to deal with new appliances. More money that we had not been intending to spend. At least washing machines are cheap. We have to get a refrigerator as well, though, and those are not cheap.