I’m back from my moving break. That doesn’t mean I’m through with moving. I have finished physically relocating from one home to the other. I turned over the keys to my apartment yesterday, and all of my belongings are in my house. But I am far from being truly moved in. There’s still a lot of unpacking and arranging to do. Everything is in piles or boxes.

I more or less have the bathroom and kitchen set up, though the kitchen is still somewhat cluttered. It’s downstairs and near the front door, so it’s where a lot of things got dropped before I tried to take them any farther. I have things in the cabinets, but I need to get a few organizational items to really finish setting up. The bedroom is set up to be able to sleep. My clothes are in various suitcases and bins in different rooms. The closets are tiny, so I’m figuring out other things I can do. I’m putting hooks on the closet walls for some things. My knit clothes are all getting folded and put in cubes that go on shelves. I’m probably going to get a couple of zip-up wardrobes at Ikea to go in the basement for out-of-season clothes. In the meantime, getting dressed in the morning can be a bit of a hunting expedition.

The living room (or I guess it would be considered a den) is mostly set up, though I still need to shelve all the books. I also need to get a rug and a sofa, but it will have to be a small sofa and something that you can take apart so it will fit through the door. I was looking at one at a furniture store here, but the door would have to be six inches wider to get it into the room (it’s not even all that narrow a door. It’s a modern sliding glass door, so I don’t know who could buy this small sofa and get it into their house). So I may end up doing Ikea for that, too. In the meantime, I’m using my patio lounger as a recliner for watching TV.

My office is pretty much a lost cause for now. I’m going to get all new furniture for that room, so the books will be mostly unshelved for the time being. I’m trying to get back into a writing schedule, but I’m using a laptop desk and migrating around the house until I get the office figured out. I think I’ve found a desk that will work, and if I key off that, the office will end up being kind of steampunky.

Then there’s the yard. I learned from a neighbor that this house had been abandoned for years until the people I bought it from got it at auction and remodeled it. I guess they got it early in the year and were working during the winter, so there wasn’t much going on in the yard. Now it’s exploded as spring has hit. It’s been allowed to run wild. They took out a few trees that were dangerously close to the house, but they didn’t get rid of any plants. There are a lot of flowers out there. But there are also a lot of weeds. I’ve discovered some poison ivy, and I’m trying to identify what else is out there so I’ll know what to dig up or kill and what to encourage. In the meantime, it looks kind of wild. My neighbor has offered to let me use some of his power tools, but I’m not sure you could get a mower through the yard because it’s a pretty steep hill. I’m planning to get rid of what grass there is and replace it with ground cover.

I know I have a few redbud trees, a plum tree or two (but I don’t know if they’re ornamental or if they bear fruit), and a maple, but I’m not sure of the other trees. There’s a huge bush that turned out to be a lilac. There are a lot of plants that seem to be various kinds of lilies, but they haven’t bloomed yet. I discovered the “identify” feature on my phone that looks up what you’ve taken pictures of, and that’s helped me figure out some of the plants, but I know some of their identifications are wrong, so I’m not sure how much I trust it. I may have to take my phone to a garden center and play “kill or keep” before I decide what plants to buy.

I’ve been living on frozen dinners for a couple of weeks since the kitchen has been too disorganized for cooking. I think I’m going to graduate myself to convenience meals this week. The stove has a glass top, so I’m going to have to learn how to use that at least enough to boil pasta. Then maybe next week I’ll move back to real cooking, of the sort that requires chopping and measuring. Right now, things are too chaotic for that.

I do love the house, though. It’s much quieter than the apartment. I’m near the end of a dead-end street, so there’s next to no traffic, and I don’t have an upstairs neighbor’s kid jumping up and down and screaming. Supposedly, shaking up routines and doing things in different ways is good for creativity. If so, then I should become wildly creative because the house is so different from anywhere I’ve ever lived that I can’t just put things in the obvious places that correspond with where they’ve gone before. I’m having to come up with entirely different organizational schemes that involve entirely different routines.

I’m trying to get back to writing instead of spending all day unpacking and organizing. I’m alternating a little work with a little housework. We’ll see if I can focus enough to get anything done.

It looks like I’ll be closing on the house either Thursday evening or Friday morning, and I’ll start moving soon after that, with the furniture going on April 21, so I think I’m going to take a break from posting for a week or so. That’s just one more thing to deal with when I’m already pretty overwhelmed.

Yesterday morning I had the final walkthrough to make sure they’d done the repairs I asked for. That also meant I got to see the backyard redbud trees in full bloom. I hope they’re still pretty when I get there. Today has been the Getting Stuff Done day. I’ve set up electricity, water, and Internet at the new place. Now I just need to finalize the insurance and the wire transfer for the purchase.

I’ve already boxed up a lot of books, probably at least a carload. As soon as I close, I’m going to try to get a load over. I don’t want to get a bunch of new boxes, so the plan is to fill up all the boxes I’ve got, take them to the house (it’s about a 5-minute drive), unload the boxes in the spare room that won’t have any furniture in it yet, then bring the empty boxes back and fill them for another trip. Almost all the fiction is boxed up. I just have the reference books and other nonfiction and the “brag bookcase” of the books I wrote. That’s still a lot of books. Since the earliest I could get movers was the 21st, I hope to have just about everything but the furniture and the daily life essentials (the bedding, some clothes, enough dishes to eat breakfast that morning) at the new place by then. And then I’ll just need to clean the old place and get the new place properly set up.

When I was getting ready to move about this time last year, I was doing a massive purge, so I had to make a lot of decisions about what to keep, and then I had to take things to the various donation places, and that took a lot of time. For this move, I don’t have to make decisions and I probably won’t be getting rid of things (I may pare the wardrobe a bit further now that I know what I haven’t worn in the past year, but I may not worry about running things around to thrift shops before I move). It’ll be a lot easier to just throw things in boxes.

While I was out yesterday, I stopped by a couple of furniture stores, and I think I may have found the sofa (loveseat) I want. I’m going to wait until I get my furniture in the house before I make any decisions, though. I also need to get a washer and dryer, some blinds, and lots of storage stuff. I will be breaking my personal record for most money spent in a single month, given that I’m buying a house, plus getting all this stuff.

But this will be the view from my living room. It’s glorious at this time of year, and the redbuds will also have lovely fall color. Which reminds me, I’ll also be getting more plants for the yard and deck while I’m shopping. But that will wait. I never put out plants until after Easter. We’re still getting freezes at night. I’ll be planting morning glories as soon as the weather is right.

Now to tick the last few tasks off today’s epic to-do list.

Since I’m in the process of buying a house (should be closing next week) and since I got rid of a lot of my stuff before I moved last year, I’m going to be doing a lot of shopping for house-related items in the near future. I planned to essentially start over when I found a house, which means I’ll be replacing a lot of things, like kitchen gear, linens, etc. Plus I’ll need some living room furniture and office furniture. And I’ll need area rugs, since my old house had wall-to-wall carpeting and the new house has the original 1945 hardwoods upstairs and vinyl plank downstairs.

Which means my biggest distraction lately has been online window shopping as I look for ideas. An idea will pop into my head, and then I’ll find myself searching for that thing. In fact, I just got distracted by an idea for what to do about curtains for the sliding door in the living room. I can spend hours browsing websites for various stores, picking out things I like. This reminds of when I used to read the Sears catalogue for fun when I was a kid. I made a game out of mentally decorating my imaginary future home by picking out things from the catalogue. Or I would choose my favorite item on each page. I didn’t much care for the toy catalogue, but I loved looking at the housewares, all the bedspreads, curtains, rugs, dishes, and the like. I don’t think I’d like most of what I picked out then (it was the 70s, so I probably wouldn’t like anything that was in that catalogue), but I still enjoy the game, only now I play it on the Ikea website and I have a specific house in mind.

This is making it hard to write because things to look up will pop into my head while I’m working and I get so distracted that I just give up and look it up, but then that starts a rabbit trail of thinking of something else, and so forth, and next thing I know, I’m looking up how to install curtain rails on the ceiling and wondering if a two-track system that would allow me to have sheers for daytime privacy and blackout curtains for movie/TV viewing would work, and which ones would I want.

I’m not buying anything yet, though. I have furniture I can live with, though I’ll be using my zero-gravity patio lounger in the living room until I get a sofa. I want to live in the house some before I figure out what I want. I want to see where the light falls and how it feels with the furniture I have, then I’ll figure out what storage items I need and what rugs, curtains, and furniture will give me the feeling I want.

Buying all this stuff may be a challenge, as I live in a smallish town without most of the usual big-box stores. Even in larger areas, all the places where I used to shop for house things are now gone, like Linens and Things and Bed, Bath & Beyond. Sears is a memory. I don’t know what other department stores still exist. We have a Belk here, but about 90 percent of their stuff is online only, and I want to see and touch things before I buy them so I can be sure of the feel of fabric and what the color really is. I may have to do a road trip to the DC area where they have more stores and I can do some serious shopping.

I may look around here at antique shops, and there are a few places around here where you can get Amish and Mennonite-made wooden items. One nice thing about being in a “historical” area is that the place is loaded with antique malls. I don’t necessarily need anything of great value, but I may find interesting vintage pieces that fit with the character of the house.

In the meantime, I’m doing a lot of looking around online. Ikea has a lot of storage and organization stuff, which is giving me ideas for dealing with this house’s tiny closets (one downside of a cute older home). I’m reading books on home decor and doing Internet searches.

I may just have to decide that I’m not going to get much work done until the move’s over. If I do something, then great, but I won’t expect it of myself, and I can use this time to think. If I’m thinking about decorating as I try to write, then maybe I’ll start thinking about my story ideas while I’m packing and moving.