This week has been a steady stream of unpacking boxes and not having room for anything. That’s not entirely true; it just feels like it. I know all these books fit on bookcases at the other end, so having piles all over the floor that didn’t go anywhere was leading me to tear my hair out and fight off panic attacks. HRH finally reminded me that we’ve given two bookcases up to the boy’s toys in the family room, and I remembered that my office closet was essentially all shelves that contained many, many binders and books and files, and so I’m not quite as strung out as I was before. I still have to figure out where it will all go, though. Missing two closets upstairs is really forcing me to get creative about how we store things. And on top of figuring out what books will go where, I’ve had to constantly rejig the moveable shelves in the cases to maximize the number of books going on and use the space as efficiently as possible, which has caused me to spend a lot of time looking at the stacks on the floor and back at the bookcases, doing a lot of work in my mind before I try to execute it in the physical world. HRH said last night that if we needed to buy more bookcases he was okay with that (we certainly have the room in the downstairs hallway), so I checked the online classifieds today and sent a couple of queries about used Ikea bookcases like the ones we’ve got. We also need one or two more CD racks, since about a quarter of our collection used to live in the DVD cabinet that is now downstairs.

The family room (or gaming room, as the moving team insisted on calling it) is shaping up very nicely. We found the buried box of VHS films that got Put Somewhere in the last move, so I can watch my VHS-only costume dramas any time I want again and the boy has a slew of new-to-him Disney films to discover. The kitchen was operative very quickly, except for the pot rack. Tonight HRH is painting the kitchen, and we’ll be able to hang the rack and put up the shelves. The living room has been emptied of the mountain of boxes right in the middle, as it was mostly books (okay, sure, I’ve got three lines of spine-up books across the front of the room instead, but at least it isn’t a mountain); the only boxes left have the CD player and audio receiver in them plus the satellite speakers.

My father in law brought over his small outdoor table and chairs for us to use in the gazebo thing we have out back, and HRH tightened all the bolts on the play structure so that it isn’t shaped like a rickety parallelogram any more and doesn’t sway when the boy uses it as a pirate ship.

The other thing that has been stressing me is the laundry system saga. I have been sharing my stress with Twitter but not here, so it’s only fair that you should hear about it, too.

Last week I told you about the whole preferred-pricing-certificate failure thing when HRH and his parents showed up at their appointment with the shop to buy the washer and dryer we’d researched and chosen. Not only did our certificate not apply to the laundry units because they were already priced as low as they’d go, they were out of stock for at least a month, despite the website claiming they’d ship the next day. This was an extra-huge kick in the pants because we’d passed up a fabulous weekend sale at Home Depot on Maytag Centennials in favour of the certificate, which ended up being worthless. So I’ve been spending a lot of time this week researching sales and models online (just as frustrating as trying to figure out how to get X books on [X – a bunch] shelves, but in a different way). Thursday morning I stopped at Corbeil because I’d seen an ad saying they would discount a value up to two times the equivalent sales taxes on a purchase till the end of August. They treated me exactly the way I wanted to be treated: they left me to stare at the machines in my price range and compare settings and cycles on my own, then let me approach them to ask for availability, extended warranties, and delivery. Four home runs: There was a basic set that was on sale for about three hundred dollars off its usual price; the protection plan was affordable; the set was in stock; and they’d deliver next day, free of charge. I looked wistfully at the Maytag set we’d passed up at Home Depot, but there’s no way we can afford a thousand dollar laundry set right now, not with a protection plan on top of it. The set we’ll get is by Inglis, a Canadian company (yay!) who made our fridge and is now manufactured by Whirlpool. We’ll go buy them tomorrow, because we’re really running into the must-wash-linens stage of after the move. I will be thankful to have the opportunity to wash things again.

My allergies acted up really badly the first two nights we were here. There is deep pile carpet on the stairs, and the previous owners had a cat. I think that perhaps they did not own a vacuum, too. HRH went to town on the stairs with the Shop-Vac, and we’ve been running the forced air on the fan setting for a couple of hours each night to clean the air in the house, which has helped immensely. The weather has been gorgeous, sunny and bright and breezy during the day and nice and cool at night. So cool, as a matter of fact, that HRH is making noises about pulling out the not-yet-unpacked boxes of heavy linens and using the feather duvet on our bed now instead of later this fall. Apparently we’re supposed to have another heatwave this coming week, though, so perhaps the feather duvet will remain in storage for now.

We’ve been enjoying the later start time in the morning. The boy’s preschool (and school, too) is a whole five minutes away, and since HRH didn’t have room to bring the bikes over last weekend we’ve been dropping the boy off then taking HRH to work, then running errands or whatnot before coming home and unpacking or working, then picking them up again at the end of the day. It’s been such an incredible relief to have the car again. I didn’t realise how restricted I felt, not having it to run errands when I needed to run them instead of waiting for the weekend when we tried to shoehorn as much in as possible. Now if only the boy’s internal clock would get the later-start-time memo. He’s been waking up between five and five-thirty.

I think that’s about it for now. I have a mostly-operational office as of early this afternoon. Now I just need to hang art and take the extra boxes of art and sewing supplies downstairs, but I’ll leave that for HRH. The books have just been shoved on shelves for now, but I can finesse them later.

We go offline tomorrow, as our phone line is being transferred to the new place. I may be able to set up the computer tomorrow afternoon, I may not; either way, you may not hear from us till Sunday at the latest. Don’t e-mail us with anything urgent. Also, please don’t break the internet before I get back to announce our triumphant relocation. We thank you for your consideration.

The boy was home today with a fever. He was tired yesterday at preschool, then went right to bed by choice and refused dinner when he got home. These coupled with his progressive incoherence led me to take his temperature, and he’d developed a high fever. It was a bit lower this morning, and gone by this afternoon. He had a two and a half hour nap, a sure indicator he was ill, and he only woke up because I went in to shake him gently. But he’s fine now and will be going to school tomorrow as usual, leaving HRH and I free to do a final packing blitz and take all the fragile stuff over to the house.

I’m so tired. So is HRH, as he’s been spending every day and night over at the house, painting. His dad has been with him every day as well, doing reno work (some of which was unplanned by us, but we’re grateful for his time and energy in taking them on; they’re definite improvements). The only dark spot on the whole experience so far is the fiasco at the store tonight when HRH and his parents arrived to buy our new laundry set. Our real estate agent’s company had issued us a certificate for this store giving us preferred pricing on our purchases in all departments when made through a commercial sales associate by appointment. Well, after all my careful research and choosing of a set, at the appointment HRH attended tonight he was told that the set we want isn’t available for this preferred pricing scheme, the preferred pricing varies depending on what you buy, and quite apart from all of that the set we chose is out of stock until at least halfway through September, despite the website claiming a delivery date of August 22. I’m livid. Especially so because my in-laws called me from another store two days ago saying they’d buy us another set on sale that had free delivery, and I declined, saying that the set we wanted from the store to which we had the certificate was pretty much the same price and we’d get a discount of some kind thanks to the certificate, so we’d wait for our appointment. What a mistake. It’s a good thing I wasn’t there at the appointment tonight, because I’d have told the salesman exactly what I thought of this whole vague and ill-defined preferred pricing scheme (promising ‘preferred pricing in all departments’ when you really mean ‘preferred pricing on only some of what we sell and we won’t tell you what until you get to your appointment’ is shady enough to qualify as false advertising in my book), as well as my opinion of the website that tells me things would be available to my postal code zone in three days when they’re actually out of stock across the entire island of Montreal for a month.

Anywhats; we’ll figure something out. We need a laundry set by the middle of next week at the very latest, but I’ll research what I can (all the more reason to hook up the internet ASAP at the new place tomorrow) and we can go out on Sunday to shop for a set in our price range that’s in stock now. And I certainly won’t be buying them from that branch, if that store at all.

Tomorrow morning the boys head out and I pack the pantry, the last of the dishes, the pots and pans, and disconnect the computer. And then that’s that; the last phase of the move begins. I’m truly awed by how much HRH has been able to move over to the house by doing two or three carloads a day while painting as much as he has, I really am. He’s been heroic.

See you on the flip side, world. Have a lovely Friday and Saturday. Think good moving thoughts for us tomorrow, but especially Saturday morning and early afternoon!

1. I am feeling much better after taking it… easier over the weekend. I wish I could say I took it easy without qualification, but there was zipping about and visiting the house and keeping the boy occupied while HRH worked over there involved, and while it was not the physical stress of packing, it was also not entirely restful.

2. The kitchen is the hardest room to pack in a house. Every time you fill six boxes, there is still a bunch of stuff left on shelves. I know a lot of the box space is taken up with packing paper around breakables and protective boxes for smaller objects, but still. Please, people, for the love of the gods: stop giving us coffee mugs as gifts. And it is somewhat disheartening to realise that the pantry is actually one of the least-stuffed cupboards, too. This is partially due to the fact that we have been consciously buying less pantry-destined stuff to cut down on what we’ll have to move, which in turn is making dinners creative, to say the least.

3. The paint colours have been chosen. They are:

Kitchen: Cool Current (pale grey-green)
Living room: Mermaid’s Eyes (sage green)
Upstairs hallway: Mantra (pale taupe)
My office: Tahini (deep butter)
The boy’s bedroom: Crepe and Toffee Bar (dark parchment and warm mid-brown)
Downstairs hallway and family room: Macadamia (warm parchment)
Master bedroom: Pyramid (warm taupe) Japanese Garden (very pale green, to go with the warm varnished wood of one wall)

HRH has spent the day pouring primer on all the atrocious colours. Since there are miles of pine trim and moldings in the living room as well as a door and two windows there’s a tonne of masking to do before priming it tomorrow, so he’s stuck back there tonight to get it done or he’ll lose valuable painting time tomorrow and suffer a cascade effect through the rest of the week.

4. My father-in-law went over today and took down the claustrophobia-inducing laundry room wall in preparation for making the room two feet wider, bless him. Now I will actually be able to open the dryer door all the way. He also showed up at the house with a new BBQ.

5. Correspondence-wise, I just did the one final address change with a major utility that needed to be done pre-move. I only have two address changes left, both of which can be be done post-move. I also handled the communications to the moving team and the housewarming list.

Now I think I shall pour myself a glass of wine in one of the pewter goblets (I packed all the regular wineglasses in the first round of kitchen packing; WHAT WAS I THINKING) and settle down with Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go, which is very excellent. When the boys get home I shall magically create something from what’s in the pantry and freezer.