Last Tuesday, I signed a stack of documents that made me a homeowner. It was originally supposed to be on Wednesday, but the closing date was moved up to Tuesday because a big snowstorm was coming on Wednesday. It's a good thing we moved the date to Tuesday, because the storm ended up dumping somewhere between 16 inches and 2 feet of snow on the area (varied by exact location).
I don't need to leave my current residence quite yet, so fortunately I can move by bits and pieces. The downside of this is that there will be a lot of shuttling between my old and new residences.
I didn't even try to get to the house on Wednesday. Work was closed, and nobody went out driving if they could avoid it.
On Thursday evening, after work, I performed my first task as a new homeowner - shoveling out paths to the doors. Perhaps I should have started in the morning before work, but I underestimated the size of the task. After almost three hours, I had cleared a path from the street to the front door, and a large part of the driveway and a second path from the driveway to the front door. I learned a few lessons from this:
1.) ALWAYS check my coat pockets to make sure I have my winter gloves and hat. I forgot them, so I did all of this shoveling with bare hands and earmuffs only. Fortunately, it was cold but not windy.
2.) My new house requires a lot of snow removal. It has a relatively long, curved driveway, and a relatively long, curved path from the driveway to the front door. A second, shorter pathway from the front doorway to the street is recommended for access. One person with a shovel needs to do quite a bit of work to clear these paths.
3.) I must invest in a snowblower.
On Friday, I took delivery of my first pieces of furniture, a kitchen table and four chairs. I also learned from the mailman, who showed up shortly after the furniture movers left, that he puts the mail in a mail slit in the side door. This cleared up a bit of a mystery that I had forgotten to ask the previous owners about, but it also meant that I needed to shovel a third path, since the previous paths did not cover the side door.
On Saturday, my father and I got a small UHaul truck and moved a bunch of boxes and a couple of pieces of furniture, the only furniture that I am keeping.
Yesterday, I finally finished clearing the driveway, chipped ice that had formed on the paths to the doors, bought a bunch of cleaning and kitchen supplies, set up my desktop computer, and tried with limited success to figure out where various items in the boxes should go. (Being obsessive-compulsive, I sometimes get hung up over things like that.)
Today, I need to get some more supplies, bring a few more things, and re-assemble a couple of pieces of furniture. I'm pretty confident that there will be no shoveling today. Tomorrow, though, we're supposed to get a few more inches of snow.
Wednesday, I get a bed, table, and easy chair delivered - weather permitting, I assume.
Even with this going on, the most stressful aspect of my life for the past week, as it has been for the last 2 or 3 months, has not been anything going on outside, but rather my almost constant struggling with a very bad attack of Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder. I don't want to go into detail here, but it has been pretty severe and it has come at a very bad time. So far, though, I have been weathering the move, the OCD, and the weather itself.
