Showing posts with label moving. Show all posts
Showing posts with label moving. Show all posts
Sunday, November 13, 2011
Autumn storms, odds and ends
Two weekends ago, we had a freak autumn snowstorm that dropped a little more than a foot of snow on trees that still had the majority of their leaves. As a result, some people lost power for a week, and trees and tree limbs went down everywhere. (I was lucky, losing power for a mere three days, but darn was it cold at night in my house!) A maple tree in my yard had a large, horizontal limb partly break off and fall onto a privet hedge. Part of it was sticking out into the street, and I had to grab my pruning saw and go out while it was snowing to cut that part of it off so that it wouldn't block cars. The part that wasn't sticking out into the street is still where it fell, still partly attached to the tree. The tree-pruning companies are so booked up that I couldn't get an appointment for someone to come and remove it until the 22nd of this month, still a little more than a week away. Here's the branch:
Here's another view:
Here's the tree just a little more than a week before the storm - you can see the branch that broke off in the lower right:
In other news, my father will be buying a new house this week. I will be helping him gradually pack and move stuff out of the old house where he has lived for almost 30 years, and where I grew up, and into his smaller new house. We will be able to do this gradually because he plans to sell the old house to neighbors who are interested in it, and they won't be ready to move in until around March.
Monday, January 17, 2011
New Homeowner
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.
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.
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