Are you done moving yet?

I think that when we look back on 2011 from a safe distance of, say, fifteen years, that my husband and I will believe we made the right choice. I think that we will pat ourselves on the back for buying at the low point of the market, thereby gaining our family a much nicer home than we would have achieved otherwise. I hope.
So, we have owned the new house for three and a half months, and occupied it for two and a half. Surely we're done moving. Right?

Um...um...sure.

The old house still holds one thing of value to us: a really long stepladder that is a pain to transport (and I have no idea why the movers didn't put it on their really long trucks to transport...). There is a pile of junk that I need to give to some charity (junk meaning outgrown clothes, coats, extra dishes and knick knacks that we haven't had a place for in years and didn't feel like lugging along to the new basement). Obviously, the old house is still on the market. (And the price is going down folks...did I mention how this was a good time to buy? Like, you're getting a ton of house for the money...).

The new house is slightly organized. There are a few rooms that don't have cardboard boxes in them anymore. There are a few rooms that do have curtains on the windows (namely the bedrooms and master bath). I don't think we have hung anything on a wall yet (except those few curtain rods). We haven't done any landscaping yet. Our patio furniture lives temporarily in our garage, awaiting a patio to call its own. But as of this past Saturday, we can finally park two cars in our new three-car garage. We haven't yet convinced our in-car automatic garage door openers to talk to the new garage doors. We have installed cat-doors to allow the fur dudes access to the basement litter boxes.

It's a work in progress.

So, we are getting to the part of the year where people don't like to buy houses (I guess they don't fit under the tree very well), so our old house may get offered for rent if it doesn't find a buyer soon. I'd rather sell than mess with a renter, but I'd rather rent than continue paying for a vacant house. We have holiday time coming up and don't (so far) have any major travel planned, so there is hope that we can get a few more things out of boxes and hung onto walls and generally spruced up.

I am still clinging to hope that in a few years we will fondly look back on our move and be so glad we put ourselves through the trouble. The thought keeps us going through payments and raised-then-dashed-hopes of buyer interest, through phone calls to old neighbors to help with trash cans and lawn companies to mow before open houses, through the hauling of boxes up and down stairs and the filling of trashcans with stuff we probably shouldn't have packed in the first place.

It will be worth it. It will be worth it. It will be worth it. (I hope).