I've explained that the apartment is one big chaotic mess from when after the movers got here and that it is going to take some time to get organized and have things put away in theire proper place.
But it's kind of hard to get an idea of what we're up against just by hearing me speak about it. So, I think some visual aids are in order.
The movers finally arrived on Tuesday, September 8th. There were some difficulties involved.
First of all, Neil was in the hospital after having had to be brought to the emergency room the night before, when he suffered an unexplained mini-seizure at a Baha'i Feast. I had been at the hospital overnight, waiting with Neil for a hospital room to open up.
By the time 4:30 AM rolled around, both Neil and I thought that it would be a good idea for me to go back to the apartment so that I could get a couple of hours of sleep before the movers arrived. I was SO exhausted that I did not even bother getting out of my clothes. It was not going to be worth it for just 2 hours of sleep.
And 2 hours of sleep was all I got.
As soon as I got up at around 7:00 AM, I started picking up stuff off the floor so that there would be room for when the movers arrived. I didn't have time to deflate the air mattress, so I just stuffed it in the walk-in closet.
At 7:35 AM, I woke up Ariana and Joe and told them to start picking stuff off the floor in their room.
10 minutes later, as I was enjoying a cup of coffee on the patio, I saw Steve the moving guy walking up the path way, heading towards the apartment.
As I expected, there was going to be a major problem in unloading the truck and getting all the stuff into the apartment.
The first problem was due to the major road construction that's been going on around the area. The second problem was due to the fact that the apartment complex where we live was not built to accommodate semis (also known as tractor-trailers).
The only gate that a tractor trailer could possibly pass through was on the diametrically opposite side of the apartment campus, and there were 5 buildings and 2 swimming pools between that gate and our building. And even if the semi did get through, the driveways were so narrow and twisty that there was no way that a truck that large could even make it part way to our door.
Steve said that in order to get the stuff from the moving van, he would have to hire a smaller truck, unload all the stuff from the moving van onto the smaller truck, and then bring the smaller truck to our apartment, where it could be unloaded. (It may require more than one trip with the smaller truck.) And something like that was going to cost us over an additional $600.
The next alternative would have been to unload the moving van at a different address and for us to transport our belongings from that place to our apartment ourselves. That was the plan we decided upon.
Joe's sister was kind enough to allow us the use of her garage to serve as the unloading point for the movers. Once the movers finished the unloading, Ariana and Joe were going to transfer the stuff to our apartment on a 14-foot U-Haul truck that I rented for the day.
Because I had to go back to the hospital to attend to Neil, the 2 kids were on their own to do all that back-and-forth hauling themselves. They made 3 trips from Joe's sister's garage to the apartment. And they single-handedly loaded and unloaded the truck themselves ~ just Ariana and Joe. They would have made a 4th trip, but they had to get the truck back to U-Haul before 7:00 PM.
(With all the hard and heavy bull work Ariana and Joe did, I think they definitely earned their keep! At least for this month. LOL)
All that was left at Joe's sister's garage was the wooden rocking horse that Neil made for Ariana, a wooden chair, and a ladder that Neil wanted me to bring to Texas. (In the meantime, a lot of stuff was given away to Joe's family.) And judging from how crowded the apartment was after Ariana and Joe moved all the stuff, it was highly doubtful that there would have been room for those 3 items.
When I finally got back from the hospital, which was after the kids made their third trip, the apartment looked pretty much like I expected it to look.
Boxes and cartons were everywhere and piled high. There was no way Neil would have been able to navigate the narrow and treacherous goat paths that led from one room to another. In fact, it was just as well that he was going to be spending another night in the hospital.
This is what I first saw when I stepped foot into the apartment. Scary, isn't it?
No matter which way you look at it, it's impossible to find a clear space in the living room.
Where is everything going to fit?
And this is just the living room. What about all the other rooms?
This is looking from the living room out to the dining area.
Another view from the living room out to the dining area.
This is looking out from the kitchen to the dining area. The hallway is beyond that.
The hallway was actually the clearest spot in the apartment because we needed to have a pathway to get to the bedrooms and bathroom.
Here's another hallway view from the master bedroom. It seems as though Callee and Emi are trying to make as much sense of all this chaotic mess as we are.
Here's the master bedroom. Seeing the lack of space to set up the bed, I was sure glad that I did not deflate the air mattress.
Look at how crowded the master bedroom is!I didn't take any pix of Ariana's bedroom because she and Joe were still asleep when I took all these pix. But rest assured, her bedroom was just as bad as the rest of the apartment. Even the patio was crowded and filled with stuff.
So all you folks who were wondering why I did not post any blogs for awhile, can you now see why? And can you now understand that when I say that the apartment is in such a chaotic mess that it's going to take a VERY long time to get everything organized and in order that I am not exaggerating?
It's been very slow trying to dig our way out. 4 trips to the self-storage unit have relieved the chaos only very slightly.
There is SO much to get through that it's like a rat having to eat its way out of a large sack of dog food. But unlike us, the rat would probably enjoy its task.
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