Moving stresses me out. Especially when everything is in boxes…and you know you’ll have to unpack it all.

(That’s only the kitchen…but you get the idea.)

A couple weeks ago we moved into our official home here in Silicon Valley. And since Apple is totally awesome, they paid for movers to pack up our stuff and drive it out here. Of course, they hired the best of the best, so everything was packed VERY thoroughly. Everything was wrapped in paper. EVERYTHING. It’s great for keeping things safe in transit, but it’s a pain to go through.

I’m pretty sure that’s like two trees’ worth of paper…and that’s only a quarter of it.

Unpacking was fun. The boxes were labeled according to room, but we never knew what we’d find inside. Unwrapping all that paper was like Christmas morning…except that after we unwrapped things, we had to figure out where to put them and fold the paper in neat stacks to be carried to the recycle bin. That part was less exciting.

One thing I learned about unpacking…it’s easy to get overwhelmed. If you open too many boxes at once, you’re bound to get confused. It’s also easy to get distracted. I caught myself several times wandering off to a different room, or looking through a photo album I’d just unpacked, or rearranging the glasses in the cupboard because I couldn’t figure out the most usable location for them. Unpacking takes focus. Brady hooked up his iPod to the computer speakers he had just unpacked, so that we could listen to music as we worked. That helped. We found the best thing to do is just go one room at a time, one box at a time.

Three days later, we finally had everything out of boxes. We purged our home of cardboard and paper, and single-handedly filled two dumpsters TO THE BRIM with recyclable material. Good thing there are recycling bins at our place casinoluck.ca, otherwise I would have felt really bad about killing all those trees.

And, check out our new digs…(well, the living room, anyway)

Phew…with how much work it was to unpack everything, I think we’d better stay here a while.

It’s really amazing how quickly you can make a place feel like home. Throughout the month of May I felt lonely and uprooted, like I didn’t live in Utah anymore but I wasn’t really living in California, either. But now that we’re actually in our new home, with all our stuff unpacked and put away…Brady and I are finally starting to feel settled.

Now everyone just needs to come visit!