Moved!

After doing tons of cleaning and getting ready, culminating with another half day of the same on Thursday, we were finally moved from off base to on base on Friday.  Hooray!

The movers were scheduled to show up at 8 AM on Friday, but didn’t arrive until 9.  Their plan was to completely pack all of our stuff, move it and then unpack it all in one day.  We figured they’d show up with a small army of packers to facilitate this process, but instead only 2 guys showed up.  To make things worse, after 90 minutes they felt the need to take a 30 minute break!  At around 11, a third guy arrived and we then finally started to notice some significant progress.  The moving portion of their team arrived after 12 some time and we really did have that small army finally.  They were able to get everything packed and loaded onto their trucks by around 3:30.  They told us they were going to take a lunch break and would be at our house at 5.  We weren’t optimistic that they’d be able to unload us and unpack us all in one day, so we headed to the Air Force hotel on base and checked into the room we’d reserved just in case.  They were true to their word this time and arrived promptly at 5 and immediately began unpacking.  Sharron and I had already come up with a plan for where we wanted everything to go, so she positioned herself upstairs and I sat in the entryway and directed traffic.  It took them maybe 1.5 hours to unload the trucks before we started unpacking.  The deal is that they have to take away all of the boxes and packing paper, so they needed to unpack everything they’d packed that morning.  We all went into double time and managed to get all of the boxes unpacked within another 1.5 hours.  They were able to leave a little after 8 PM.

PHEW!  By this time of day we were beat.  We headed to the bowling alley for some dinner at their Thai place before heading to the hotel to hit the sack.  We’d already decided to sleep in on Saturday, so we didn’t bother to set an alarm.  :-) 

We ended up getting up at around 8 AM and headed to the Enlisted Club for breakfast (it’s the best around).  After breakfast we headed to the house and started moving furniture around.  I wish I could say we started organizing, but that project is a ways off I think.  The movers were required to unpack us, but they weren’t required to put everything back onto the shelf it originally came from.  We got the stuff situated enough that we could move on to the major project of moving the furniture.  We started in the bedroom so we’d have a place to sleep and began to notice that our original plan wasn’t going to work (What craziness is this!?). 

“A plan is just a list of things that aren’t going to happen.”

Ryan Phillippe’s character Mr. Parker in The Way of the Gun

We rolled into plan B.  Then into plan C.  Probably into plan D we finally managed to find something that worked.  What’s great though is that it REALLY works.  It’s like our stuff was meant to fit into the bedroom.  This would be an ongoing theme as we moved furniture throughout the house.  It didn’t work at first, but when we were finished it seems that everything was meant to fit exactly where it is.  Our living room and office are SO well layed out that it’s really nice to just be in those rooms.  Our rooms in our off base house were nice, but they just weren’t the right dimensions to really fit our stuff into.  I think we finished with the layouts last night before dinner.  :-)

I’m leaving in a few minutes for our move out inspection.  Hopefully we’ll get our entire deposit back and make all of the cleaning we did worthwhile!

EDIT:  Success!  They gave us back our entire security deposit and said it was the cleanest house they’d ever received back.  Wow, that’s QUITE the compliment coming from a Japanese person!  :-)