This past weekend we moved from our Columbia place. With nicole finished with her Phd we were finally in a position that we didn’t need to live so far away from work. Also since we weren’t ready to buy a place yet I was able to talk nicole into trying to live in DC for the year instead of finding another place in the suburbs. After a couple of rough weekends in June looking at over a dozen places we found a new apartment in the Ballston neighborhood of Arlington VA. The location of the new place is fantastic with the metro only a block away and plenty of shops and restaurants within walking distance.
The one major downside with doing the city living is that the apartment is a lot smaller than our old place. Our new place is only a one bedroom and is about 60% of the size of our place in columbia with no where near the amount of storage space. So in the weeks leading up to the move Nicole and I spent a lot of time going through all our stuff sorting through things. We had 3 piles of stuff. The stuff we wanted in our new place, stuff we wanted to keep but didn’t need in the next year, and the stuff we didn’t want. We ended up filling up a 5×10 storage unit out by my office and taking many car loads of stuff to the goodwill truck and to the dumpster.
On the day of the big move we were helped out by bunch of awesome friends and family (Chris from work, Adam from college, cousin Sarah, and Jenny and Andrew from lab). Since the weather was calling for a 90 degree sunny day we told people to come over at 10 but Nicole and I were up at 8 and started loading the truck. Since nicole had done such a good job of having everything organized and ready to move we had actually loaded the truck in a little over an hour which was well ahead of schedule. On top of that we managed to fit everything into the truck so that it would only need to take one trip. At that point we took a break for lunch and then jumped in our cars to head to the new place.
I had the fun pleasure of driving the 16 foot truck on the Washington beltway. It actually turned out to not be too bad getting to the new place since I knew the road so well I minimized the number of lane changes that I needed to do. Still it was a stressful drive to the new place and I was griping the steering wheel with both hands and driving in the slow lane the whole time.
Once we got to the new place we were still running far ahead of schedule and we actually didn’t have access to the loading dock because someone else was using it. So first we unloaded my car that nicole had driven up. By the time we were done with that we had the loading dock. Unloading the truck turned out to be pretty painless since we didn’t have any steps to go up and we had an elevator reserved for us. Even though we had 3 less people for a good portion of the unloading we were done in an hour and a half. Our two places were a mess and nothing was unpacked but we had everything moved and managed not to have any major disasters. We made a quick trip out to the storage unit to drop the last of the stuff off and then headed back to our new place to start unpacking. It was a long day and we spent a lot of time getting ready for it but we were happy to be in our new place.
