Kick Back and Relax – Not!

Well, not exactly! I was looking forward to this moment with immense anticipation, and expected that I would just collapse somewhere in a soft chair enjoying a tall glass of ice cold Perrier and a good book. But somehow reality never quite measures up, does it?

There are a ton of great things for me to be relieved about, though. I am 99.5% moved in to my new house (but still only about 33.3% unpacked). My old house sold for 98% of our asking price after less than a week on the market (but the conditions don’t clear for another week and the deal doesn’t close for another 60 days after that). Also: school is out! Report cards are written, entered, printed and filed and I got a contract for next year at my same wonderful school! So, yeah, overall life is good.

Still, I can’t quite bring myself to flop down in a soft chair and break out the mineral water (even though I keep getting insistent voicemails from the library about the books I took out last month that I haven’t finished reading yet). Every time I turn around I see another job that needs doing. First, there’s the unpacking:

Everywhere I look I see a scene like this and it makes me bonkers. I feel like I don’t deserve to take a break when there’s all this to be unpacked, sorted out and put away. Right now I only have one “sanctuary” area: the family room. Even my kitchen isn’t totally unpacked (a big box of spices and nowhere to put them yet) and my bedroom is a disaster of unhung artwork and basket upon basket of clean, unfolded clothes. It’s a bit like a chain reaction: you can’t put away the clothes until you move the artwork that’s blocking your dresser drawers or get rid of the boxes stacked up in the closet. So why fold the clothes if you can’t put them away? And it seems like there’s a chain reaction like this everywhere I turn. I can’t put away my daughter’s clean clothes until I move her desk out from in front of her dresser. But I can’t move her desk until I move her bed. And I can’t move her bed because the movers lost 3 of the screws needed to secure the top bunk. And I can’t find the screws anywhere (because so much stuff is still in boxes). I’m getting dizzy just thinking about it!

But you know, I guess I’ll be able to get through it all eventually. I do have pretty much the whole summer to plod away at these jobs (if my kids would stop making messes every time I get a room all sorted out). But one thing I do know…this house is never going to look as good as my professionally-staged old house. The only way we were able to keep it looking this good was by not actually living in it!

Talk about fantasy, eh?