Pre-move freak-out.

Pre-move freak-out.

So yesterday we stopped by the new place to get a few measurements and I almost completely lost it. Allow me to preface this with a little background. It was raining and I got drenched on the way home. Gal Pal had been running errands in a ZipCar in shitty traffic caused by said rain. Once we got to the coachhouse I couldn't get the door open with any of the keys, so by the time GalPal finally figured out how to unlock to entry to our new home we were both in pretty foul moods.

Upon entering the house immediately seemed dingier than either of us remembered. We also realized that the kitchen had almost no counter space and only a few cabinets. For some reason I had thought there was a pantry but I was wrong. We went upstairs to figure out where stuff was going to go and that's when we realized that while there was tons of crawlspace storage, there were only two closets in the whole house, and they were both pretty tiny.

Suddenly we were both freaking out. The house we had so looked forward to moving into seemed more like a dumpy nightmare than a grand new palace. And the layout had me worrying about Betty the Beagle again. We had planned on confining her to the family room and what would be our books and music room but suddenly I was worried that would be too small a space for her. One reason I was so excited about moving into a new house was because I could take off her bark collar and let her run around and enjoy the view from ground level windows. But if she stays in that one space, there is no view.

And then we headed down to the basement to find it full of stuff we thought would be gone before we moved in. The previous tenant moved her stuff out but the neighbors were storing some stuff in there and haven't gotten it out yet, and we were counting on that storage space. The whole visit was a bit dispiriting since we'd been so excited about the move up until then.

So, after surveying everything and making some decisions on where what would go when the movers were there on Friday we headed home ... to find that Betty the Beagle had broken into the fridge and peed in the house. It was the last straw. We cleaned up the mess, I went into shut-down mode, and GalPal just headed straight for the bedroom and closed the door. It was just too much and cast an emotional pall over over everything I'm just starting to get through. You see I spent most of last night trying to sleep, then sipping a finger of bourbon, then making a few cups of hot, soothing (decaffeinated) tea, wondering if we made a mistake not grabbing the apartment we had liked in Logan Square, realizing that was a pointless and entirely fruitless line of thought to pursue, then puzzling through the issues at hand and trying to solve them.

After some thought, and some searching on craigslist, the issues that so vexed me seem totally solvable and I feel much better about it. GalPal is still in a funk but I hope once we start unpacking and making the place our own over the weekend she'll be able to regain the excitement we both felt just 24 hours ago.