Moving in

All this talk about cleaning up and clearing out has got me reminiscing about the time 22 years ago when we moved into this house we live in. Below are some photos I took on July 11, 2003. We had arrived on June 7 and had been camping in the house for a month while we waited for our containerload of furniture and other possessions to arive from Californing. We had lived in two houses out there: one we rented in Silicon Valley for four years, and one we bought in San Francisco and lived in for 8 years. Before that, we had lived in rented apartments for a dozen years.

So we had accumulated some furniture and a lot of other stuff. Some had sentimental value. Some was just stuff we liked and didn't want to get rid of. So we moved a 20-foot container full of stuff to France. We spent much of June cleaning the house we were camping in here in Saint-Aignan. There's nothing like "upping sticks" and moving into new accommodations to motivate a person to do some serious cleaning. We didn't know how long it would take the container to arrive. When it arrived on July 11, we had the moving company crew pack all the stuff that was in boxes into the garage. We knew we could empty them gradually and take all the stuff up to the living room, bedrooms, and kitchen, all one floor up.

We had the crew carry all the heavy heavy pieces of furniture upstairs, saving ourselves from that chore. We had them set up the bed in the living room because the bedroom we had been sleeping in for a month (on air matresses) was being stripped of of ugly wallpaper and painted (by us). We were also waiting for and carpet installer to come and put down new carpeting over what we thought was an ugly asphalt time floor.

We had been buying appliances — fridge, stove, washer/dryer, TV, microwave, telephone, VCR, CD player, etc. — while waiting for the container. We had been using patio furniture in the house, but now we would have a real dining room table, our own bed, and other familiar stuff. I was happy to have my desk and my desktop computer. I had taken the hard disk out of it and carried to France in my carry-on luggage to make sure it arrived intact. The rest of the computer — replaceable things — had been packed in the container. We traveled with a laptop.