Moving!

Robert and I loved our old apartment on Columbus Ave: it was the first place we'd bought together, the first home we painted and worked on together, the only home our kids had ever known, the place I'd labored with all three children, the home Marcus was born in and the apartment I hiked down from five minutes before Helen was born and back up to five minutes after. But life there was starting to become a bit like a sliding tile puzzle: when Samantha wanted to play the piano we had to move two chairs out of the way, and a bin of toys, and slide a third chair back in place so she could sit, which was fine as long as no one wanted to walk around the dining room during this. Imagine that level of maneuvering for every action of daily life, and you can see why I wanted to move just to have a bit more elbow room.

We started looking casually at listings when Helen was a week old, because I also thought it would be efficient to move while I was still out on maternity leave, and we closed on our new place at the very end of July. The first two weeks of August were packing and organizing and making lists and planning paint and appliances. The last two weeks of August we were in Vietnam, which was actually a lovely respite from moving. The first two weeks of September, then, were even more packing, until boxes were piled ceiling-high and we could barely see around them. We moved in on September 14th, and it took us about six weeks to get really settled in. Here are some pictures of the process.

The view from the roofdeck of our old place, one last night: