"All My Beautiful Things!"

We signed the lease on a Monday, and that Tuesday we were pulling up in front of our new house, bright and early with the Penske truck. We were paying an extra $50 bucks for the truck because it was technically due Monday, so we had to get the truck unloaded in time to drive it to Easton and return it. Paul's boss Alyson came over to help us unload, we put a movie on the iPad for Lucia in her new bedroom and proceeded to unload at breakneck speed.

Organized chaos

We tried to dump boxes in the appropriate general area which meant that anything for the bedrooms/office/attic had to go up stairs. After about the 10th trip up and down the stairs with boxes I started to wonder if we had made a terrible mistake. We haven't had to go up and down stairs for awhile. It's harder than it looks! I think my legs were more sore from running stairs than from lifting boxes.

This move was not sponsored by Lowe's, but might as well have been.

We were done unloading by around 1 or 2, so Alyson took off and we closed up the house to go return the truck. Walking into the house full of boxes was a little overwhelming, but our strategy was to get Lucia's room unpacked and set up so that she felt at home. From there we tried to refrain from just tearing open boxes, but to open and put away everything (or as much as possible) in a box before opening another one. This helped manage the chaos and helped contain the packing material mess.

Master bedroom in aqua. 

Lucia was absolutely ecstatic to see all of her toys that had been packed away. Some had been packed away for almost 6 months. Each time she discovered a familiar toy it was like Christmas, although I think she was more enthusiastic seeing her old toys, than I have ever seen her with new toys and birthdays or Christmas. One particular box that had just a mish-mash of random little toys and stuffed animals elicited a joyous exclaim, "All my beeeeauutiful things!" As she clapped and jumped, not able to contain her excitement. It was pretty cute.

Our little trooper.

We quickly realized that although this house is bigger than our house in Salem was, that the kitchen had A LOT less storage. We had a nice big built in hutch at our house in Salem that held all of our china, extra bowls, linens and empty mason jars. We also had lots of overhead shelves that served as our pantry. Paul quickly put his handyman hat on for a solution. There is a little alcove room by the back door right off the kitchen where we put our chest freezer. We decided to turn that into a full-blown pantry. We basically couldn't unpack half our kitchen boxes until that pantry was built. So, while I moved on to unpacking other rooms in the house, Paul took a trip to the hardware store and got to work building shelves.

Pantry construction in-process