2,770 sq ft to 25 sq ft…
We moved out of our home today. Our stuff has been split in three - a 5x5 storage unit of memories, sold/donated/given away, and with us at our 30-day AirBnB.
Wow, it feels like our global adventure is rushing at us now. In 31-days we drive out of Seattle. While we were in London (see post on 2 weddings in 8 days) we got the good news/bad news call from the realtor. Great news that the house is rented, bad news it is June 1. So it has been a busy 9 days back in Seattle packing up our lives and trying to see close friends!
This is why… we drove away from our house today as a family to go to our Renton AirBnB. Only ~12 miles from Beacon Hill but it marked the biggest pack up exercise of this adventure. Scarlett, 6 year old, was excited to see the new place but she was also the saddest today. Nora is 3 years old so she was crazy excited for good and bad. Bedtime was a horror, but had some funny moments when you just observed my pure failure to get Scarlett or Nora in their bedroom, let alone bed, about 45 minutes into reading books!
Cluster here too… bedtime as I mentioned. We are reeling a bit from the cost of the AirBnB, just nothing to choose from in Seattle in June so we are paying an arm-and-leg for this place. The good news is we get the rent check in July to cover the mortgage. Whitney is still on call until 8am tomorrow. Yes, crazy, she has been on call for the past 2 weeks while we have moved house.
Key factors or things of note:
Whitney and I both had incredible feelings of love at giving away so much of our furniture. We netted about $200 from selling a few items and the rest we given to friends and through a Facebook group in our neighborhood called “buy nothing” which was great.
We learned that @offerup.com is way better than @craigslist.com for selling items too, wish we had known that earlier.
We are appreciating our property manager more and more. The lease (except for the early date) is great and the quality of her vendors has been awesome. She has cleaning vendors and maintenance vendors all able to meet a schedule.
@Thumbtack.com proved amazing (again). Wanted very last minute to steam clean 5 items before we gave them away this afternoon - on Monday, Memorial Day public holiday! Posted an apologetic project at 6:23am, by 8:30am vendor confirmed and by 1pm the 5 items (sofa, 2 x rocking chairs, 2 x rugs) were fully cleaned!
@PublicStorage.com - or 5x5 storage unit is costing us $26/month + $11/month in forced insurance. Tried to exempt out of the insurance (as the contents are priceless memories) but that failed. Otherwise super happy with the temperature controlled facility as a safe place for our stuff.
@Goodwill.org amazing drop off drive through center in Seattle. The team there are so nice and efficient and seem to smoothly gather and transfer volumes of stuff. Was a great location to quickly donate smaller items that were too many to individually disseminate. Included 3 suits, bags and bags of clothes/blankets, household supplies and so on.
Each trip to the storage unit was an adventure which is hopefully helping them with the upcoming transition and parting with almost all their stuff!