Cramming the last few things in the truck
Life Happens... Even When You're in the Middle of Moving! 😂
Moving from over 3,000 square feet of living space into a unit that would eventually be just 1,350 square feet was going to be a challenge.
Not that I'm complaining. I know there are so many people who have very little, and I'm incredibly grateful for everything we have.
But let's just say we had accumulated WAY too much stuff over the years! 😂
And so, the great purge began.
We started sorting through everything when we moved from our home in the city to our temporary home in the country.
Now, packing and moving are challenging enough at the best of times. But when you're moving to two different places, with a third destination waiting in the wings?
That's a whole different adventure!
Let me explain.
We needed enough furniture and household items to live comfortably in our temporary home, but we didn't want to move everything there, only to pack it all up and move it again when our school unit was ready.
So we came up with a brilliant system.
Three piles.
Going to storage. Going to the temporary house. Going to donation.
Simple, right?
We loaded the furniture we wanted to keep into a storage container, which was then moved to a storage facility. We rented a cube truck for the things going to our temporary home, and the rest was given away.
Everything seemed to go remarkably smoothly.
Or so we thought.
The Great Pumpkin Pie Adventure! 🥧
We managed to get settled into our temporary home just before Christmas.
Now, I LOVE homemade pumpkin pie. And when I say homemade, I mean starting with an actual pumpkin!
My grandson had grown some beautiful sugar pumpkins in his garden, so I brought a few home and got to work.
We'd missed having a proper Thanksgiving dinner that year because we were so busy and exhausted from moving. So I was really looking forward to our Christmas pumpkin pie!
It was the evening of December 23rd, and I was getting everything ready so I could bake the pies fresh on Christmas Eve.
I started rolling out the pastry and went to get my pie plates.
Except...
There weren't any pie plates!
Not one.
Anywhere.
Apparently, somewhere between the storage container, the cube truck, and the donation pile, my pie plates had disappeared!
YIKES!
I frantically called my daughter to see if she had any extras.
No luck. Her husband had been busy making quiche for Christmas brunch, so all of hers were spoken for.
No problem, I thought. I'll just send my husband to Walmart.
Well, this is where small-town living gets interesting. 😂
He went from store to store — FOUR stores in total — looking for a pie plate.
Not a single one to be found!
Finally, he came home with...
A HUGE CAST-IRON PAN! 😂
And so, our beautiful homemade pumpkin pie was baked in a cast-iron pan.
It weighed a ton!
But you know what? It tasted absolutely delicious!
And it made for a pretty good story.
Although I did begin to wonder what ELSE we'd managed to pack away that we might need before moving into the school!
Our cast iron pie plate
The Case of the Missing Mattress! 🛏️
Then there was the mattress.
We had an extra mattress that we no longer needed, and we decided to take it to the dump.
We tied it onto the back of the truck and headed out.
It was late fall, early evening, and already pitch black outside.
The dump was a little way from our home, so we took a series of back roads to get there.
Bumpy back roads, I might add.
We finally arrived at the dump, just in time to unload our mattress.
We both hopped out of the truck, walked around to the back, and...
NO MATTRESS!
Gone.
Vanished.
We just stood there staring at the empty truck, completely bewildered.
And then we burst out laughing! 😂😂
Somewhere along those dark, bumpy country roads, our mattress had apparently decided it had had enough of moving and jumped ship!
So back we went, retracing our route in the dark, searching for our runaway mattress.
And where did we find it?
About THREE BLOCKS from where we'd started!
All that driving, and the mattress had barely made it out of the neighbourhood!
I still laugh when I think about the two of us standing at the dump, staring at the empty back of the truck.
And Then There Was the Furniture... 😳
Meanwhile, our furniture was still sitting in storage.
We'd originally planned on keeping it there for about six months.
Surely we'd be living in our beautiful new school home by then?
Hahahaha!
If only we'd known! 😂
As the six-month mark approached, we decided it was time to move everything to the school.
But where on earth were we going to put it?
We weren't planning on renovating the old girls' change room in the gymnasium anytime soon, so that seemed like the perfect solution.
I was a little concerned about whether everything would fit.
My husband assured me it would.
Now, when I pictured storing furniture in the change room, I imagined everything arranged in neat, orderly rows.
Couches along the walls.
Tables tucked into corners.
Boxes stacked nicely.
You know, organized!
Well...
That's not quite how it happened.
The furniture fit, all right.
But you couldn't even get into the room! 😂
Couches were standing on end. Chairs were piled on top of tables, which were piled on top of boxes. Bookshelves were crammed wherever there was an inch of space.
It was like the world's most chaotic game of Tetris!
I was convinced that by the time we finally unpacked everything, our couches would be crooked, our chairs would be damaged, and who knew what condition the rest would be in!
But I'm happy to report...
No furniture was harmed in the making of our home! 😂
I only wish I'd taken a picture of that change room.
Because I honestly don't think anyone would believe how much furniture we managed to cram into that little space!
The Memories We Make Along the Way ❤️
Looking back, there were certainly plenty of challenges during those months.
There were frustrations, disagreements, delays, and more than a few moments when we wondered what on earth we were doing.
But there was also so much laughter.
A pumpkin pie baked in a cast-iron pan.
A mattress that went missing on a country road.
And a girls' change room stuffed so full of furniture that we couldn't even open the door properly!
None of these things were part of our grand plan when we decided to buy an old school and turn it into our home.
But they've become some of my favourite memories.
It's funny, isn't it?
Sometimes the moments that frustrate us the most while we're living through them become the stories we laugh about for years afterward.
And perhaps that's one of the greatest gifts of this whole adventure.
We weren't just renovating a building or moving into a new home.
We were making memories.
And those are things we never have to worry about finding room for. ❤️
Thanks for joining me for another Monday at the Old School!
Have you ever had a moving adventure that went completely sideways? I'd love to hear about it!
Follow along — there's still plenty more to our Old School story!
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