House Update: Help! I'm Buried Under Moving Boxes

As the title might suggest, we’ve officially moved in, and are still unpacking. This post is a bit tardy, but, I haven’t been able to locate much of anything I need when I actually need it. This proves especially challenging with a toddler and newly mobile baby underfoot… so let’s just say the moving truck ate my homework and I’ll try to do better moving forward.

One big reason that we still aren’t out of boxes is this: while I don’t regret the things that we prioritized finishing before moving in (walls and floors), I do wish that we had paid more attention to storage. It really had not crossed my mind that the complete lack of storage in the bathroom would be as challenging as it is and I wish that I had at least ordered a medicine cabinet before the move in. When I say there is none, I mean that quite literally. We have a pedestal sink, so there are no drawers or cabinets below a vanity. We also have a flat, wall mounted mirror, sans medicine cabinet and a clawfoot tub without so much as a ledge to rest a bottle of shampoo on. For now, we’re making do with a couple of baskets in the nearby laundry closet and carrying our toiletries back and forth as though we are living in a dormitory.

The other area that could use some attention is the closets. As I’ve mentioned here before, we centered and expanded the opening to our master closet (the original doorway opened into an air duct leaving an opening half the width of the door) and removed a giant safe that the closet had been built around, freeing up about a third of the floor space in the process. What we still need to do is install a closet system to maximize all of that newly reclaimed closet space. We currently have a single bar that spans about two-thirds of the width and placed our dresser below, as a sort of short term solution. This setup doesn’t quite house all of the clothing and accessories we own between the two of us, so we’ve had to scale back to the essentials and leave the rest in boxes for now.

Finally, we have the kitchen. I love our kitchen. The cabinets are a mile high (I need a step stool to access the top row), but they’re a bit deceptive. Built into them are our dishwasher, refrigerator, and freezer, and while we are still left with as much cabinet space as our last place, we don’t have a pantry to supplement it, so we have to pare things back a bit there as well.

The upside to all of this? I’m finally going through everything and doing a major Kon-Marie style purge. I’m also on the hunt for the perfect medicine cabinet and vanity, so I’m sure you’ll be seeing a roundup on that soon enough. As we spend more time in the space, I’m getting to know it better and am learning quickly what I love about it and what I don’t, while other things are growing on me bit by bit.