On Wednesday, July 6, we spent the day with Mom and Amanda. We got to see Mom’s new house and the surrounding area. We also drove past our new apartment and some of the neighborhoods in Seattle. The four of us had lunch at Pallino in University Village. After that, we hung out with Dad and searched for houses online.

On Thursday, July 7, Nick and I saw our apartment for the first time and signed the lease. It’s smaller than the old apartment, but it’ll do. We then went furniture shopping with Mom and Amanda to see what was available for the few pieces of furniture we’ll need at the new apartment. We also watched Harry Potter & the Deathly Hollows – Part 1 in preparation for Part 2, which comes out this Friday.

On Friday, July 8, we got our Washington State driver’s licenses… and I found out that I’m going blind, lol. Well, not really, but I can’t see far away as well as I used to. I barely passed my vision test, so I’m going to see an eye doctor next month about getting glasses. >< After that, we went to Grandma and Grandpa’s to clean our cars (inside and out) and we went out to dinner with them at a Mexican restaurant.

Yesterday was the first day in a long time in which we weren’t super busy. We just stayed at the cabin all day and relaxed.

As of today, we’re staying at Uncle Eric’s until the apartment is ready on Thursday. Nick starts work tomorrow – how exciting!

Now that I’m at an actual computer (our laptop), here are some before & after pictures of the old apartment:

Outside the apartment. Ours was the top-right (with the turret).

Apartment - Before

Apartment - After

It was so weird to see our apartment without our things in it. I’ll be sure to take pictures of the new apartment when we move in later this week.

Since I’m such a geek, I setup a webcam pointed out our window that takes pictures on movement detection. (Geek notes: I’m using a mac mini + Periscope + a logitech c910. The picture quality is normally better with that webcam, but it’s behind a screen). Here’s a shot from the cam of the cubes and us (we’re in the smart car) leaving for work this morning. The pictures from the cam are pretty boring… If they were more exciting I think I would have made a time lapse video from them, but I don’t think it’d be worth looking at right now.

Our going away party at Dad’s place went well. Marie and I both had a ton of fun in spite of the Relocube delay.  It was great having everyone together, and the weather was perfect. We’ll definitely miss our family and friends here in Michigan, but luckily the internet will make that more bearable than the pre-internet days (seriously, what did people do back then?).

Tonight is loading day so we’ll be packing the cubes and getting them ready to go across the country tonight. We’ve already recruited some helpers and we plan to feed them pizza too. I bet you’re all jealous that you don’t get to help now, aren’t you?

So, we were lucky enough to get some more boxes from Paul, over at CMP. He hooked us up with some nice boxes and packing tape and now I think we’ll have enough boxes. Getting free boxes has certainly helped make this less painful. Thanks go out to both my mom and Paul!

We have stacks of boxes all over our apartment, our walls are nearly bare and our bookshelf is eerily empty. It’s weird to see our apartment in such disarray. I can’t wait to get on the other side and start the unpacking.

In other news, we ran the oven through the cleaning cycle and while I was out picking up some other packing supplies. Marie had to deal with a smoke detector that kept going off and she couldn’t reach to unplug it (we’ve already disassembled our chairs). She fanned it with an unassembled cardboard box to get it to stop.

We packed up everything in the kitchen today, so from now on we’ll be eating out. We have plans already most nights so it shouldn’t be a problem. We also put the old door knobs back on our bedroom and bathroom doors. They were originally crappy plastic ones that we had replaced with some nice stylish door knobs we picked up Home Depot. I also put the crappy old thermostat back on and packed our nice programmable one.

So overall now I’d say we’re 85% packed. We’ll have Wednesday to finish up and get everything ready to load into the Relocubes on Thursday. Already recruited some helpers for that; thanks Mom, Dad, Harry, Mike & Cherie.

One last note, I added an email subscription widget (over on the right). Just stick your email address in there and you can subscribe to get updates when we make new posts.

We unfortunately didn’t think to start this blog earlier, so here’s a quick bit of info to catch you up on what we’ve done so far.

Friday last week we put money down on a one bedroom loft style apartment at Radford Court in North East Seattle. We chose Radford Court because they’re affiliated with UW and month-to-month rent wasn’t too much more than signing a lease. It’s also located near UW making it an easy commute or bus ride for me.

Yesterday we secured our mover. After weighing out several options, from full service moving, to renting a truck and driving it out there ourselves, we chose to get a U-pack Relocube from ABF. Price-wise it’s the cheapest option and we feel it’s a safer option than the others as well, both for our stuff and for our sanity.

Since we own two vehicles, a Smart Fortwo and a Ford Escape, we thought we would be able to tow our Smart behind our Escape, but it turns out the trailers available for one-way rental weigh more than our Smart and would be too much for our Escape to handle safely. So we’re recruiting help from another driver to go cross country. Marie and I have experience with the Detroit-Seattle drive; we’ve made the trip three times by car now. The first time was when Marie moved out here to Michigan, and just last year we road tripped to Seattle and back in our Smart for fun. We’re actually looking forward to the drive.

That more or less sums up our current situation. We still have a ton of packing to do and a lot of stuff to get in order, but I think we’re doing pretty well so far. The big things are taken care of and my stress level has declined quite a bit.