Packing up: Preliminary Edition

You'd think that with the Junebug coming, and all this writing I have to do, that we'd be trying to conserve out energy, but no. In fact, we're just laying in to all kinds of projects. Among them, preparing for a possible move.

What? you say. Why would you want to move now?

To a smaller house.

Umm, Horace? You're going to have more people, so you'll need all your space, if not more!

Actually, our house if freakin' huge. Coming from a major metro area to this small town, we got reverse sticker shock, and purchased a very large home. Like seven rooms that could be bedrooms, with 4.5 baths. We once housed six additional guests and everyone could sleep in their own bedroom, or with their partner. we love how much space we have, we love the room for romping around, we love the amount of space it has to display our stuff, but it is LARGE and more expensive than we need. Plus its location outside of town over two ridges in a snowy part of the country that apparently doesn't deal well with snow, with a longish and very steep driveway and yard has not endeared me (who does the driveway shoveling and lawnmowing) to it much these few years.

Anyway, we're thinking a smaller house in the main downtown neighborhood where all our firends/ colleagues live would be nice and economical, saving on the mortgage payment as well as on gas.

So in a couple of weeks, we're going to test the housing market, putting ours up, and seeing what we'll be able to find downtown for ourselves.

Though we are half-prepared to fail in this endeavor and spend next year in this house just like this one, we still ahve to prepare as if we could be movinig in two-to-six months. And so we are getting our house ready to show. I've been watching HGTV obsessively for tips on "staging" the house, and while the yard is going remain a liability (It's hard to ahve curb appeal when you'r house is 25 feet higher than the street--side note: I went to college with the host of "Curb Appeal." We were very good friends)).

What I have been doing is organizing, picking up, clearing bric-a-brac and personal photos, and cleaning smudges on walls and preparing to paint the basement, and clearing out the garage, and...

You get the picture.

I feared that this would actually get in the way of writing, but it seems to have been a pretty good way to expend nervious energy that might otherwise be spent on facebook, or reading every article on Salon.com, or obsessing about the latest forecast for snow. It hasn't stopped me from reading Super Bowl analysis, as I am a Steelers fan from way back (when I first "rooted" for them as a small child, they had only three Super Bowl titles...)

Wow, I am in random mode tonight.

So anyway, to summarize: selling house (maybe), cleaning up, packing away personal stuff, not procrastinating as much, etc. etc. The point is:

We have a LOT of stuff. a LOT. I wish I could say that this has spurred me to cleanse my life of clutter and simplify, but really it just proves to me that despite my vaguely Marxist leanings, I am a bourgeois bastard, and I like my random pointless conspicuous consumer goods: all the linen napkins, the pottery barn vases, artistically candid photos, the Martha Stewart arrangments on end tables and mantlepieces. And so if we don't sell this house, out it will all come again, the personal clutter that makes this place home.