Three years, fourteen months, and eight weeks

You know I love a good milestone post on the blog. This week the Taylors have three to note as we move solidly into the fall season.

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Three years: transplanted

Last week, I bought some new pots for my lily and hibiscus plants. They were still in the original pots and were getting root bound, so it seemed like the thing to do before bringing them to overwinter inside the house. Since today marks three years since our move to Washington, D.C., I reflected a bit on my own transplantation from Colorado to the east coast. It’s hard to say that after three years I still feel “new,” but I wonder just how deep our new roots here go.

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Rocky Mountain hi

Thursday morning, Bart sent me this picture:

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Reflecting on two years

On the morning of November 10, 2012, Bart and I saw the sun rise one last time from our driveway in Erie, Colorado as we got in our cars and began the three day, 1700 mile trek to our new home in Washington, D.C. Two years used to seem like an eternity, but I still feel “new” to my job, our church, and the area in general even 24 months after our relocation. Nevertheless, a lot has happened for Bart and me since we began this new chapter in 2012.

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Making up for lost time

It was astounding how many visitors we had when we first moved to Washington, but I was even more astounded by how few we had after we bought our house last year. We now have a lovely guest suite with a private bath downstairs and have had practically no guests all year to enjoy it! Even when we hosted Bart’s sister and our niece last spring, we stayed in the guest room while they could take a couple of rooms upstairs. However, in October we have been making up for lost time in the guest department. From weekend visits from friends and family to having someone dog-sit while we were out of town, we’ve hosted quite a number of folks in rapid succession at Hotel Taylor the last few weeks.

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One year: looking back

Believe it or not, this weekend marks one full year that we’ve been in our new house. I guess that after a year, you can’t really call a 52-year-old house new, but it still feels like yesterday since we had boxes piled high everywhere. We’ve been pretty busy this year, ripping things out, putting new things in, and making our own personal mark on our space. We’ve also accomplished a lot out of the house, from regional travel to making friends, from getting involved at church to traveling out of the country a few times. Let’s take a look back at what all our first year as homeowners in the DC area has brought us.

Home sweet home

 

• Learned to wake up at oh-dark-thirty to get to work at 6:00 am.
• Renovated/updated a bedroom and a pantry closet.
• Traveled to Raleigh to visit family and friends.
• Went to a few baseball games.
• Made trips home for Christmas and during the summer.
• Almost finished logging two huge oak trees we had cut down.
• Bought a new car (and put 8,000 miles on it in just over three months…seriously???).
• Organized the garage.
• Went into DC to see the zoo, cherry blossoms, and the National Portrait Gallery.
• Took a driving tour of Gettysburg.
• Perfected my waffle recipe.
• Survived a few polar vortices, including one with a broken boiler.
• Pulled through horrible allergies and a bout of stomach bug, bleh.
• Made two international trips (three for Jennifer).
• Made peace with high humidity (just kidding, I still hate it).
• Watched our once paralyzed dog chase squirrels across the yard again.
• Uprooted gigantic azaleas with a pickup truck.
• Successfully grew basil–though it sadly died when the weather turned just a little cool–and an avocado.
• Decked out our front porch.
• Toured New England during the fall, including a trip to the Baseball Hall of Fame.
• Crushed some candies and started doing fun, creative stuff again.
• Observed birds, squirrels, deer, chipmunks, foxes, raccoons, snakes, and golden-doodles in our yard.
• Swept every known kind of outdoor debris off the deck all year long.
• Hosted fewer visitors than we did while we rented our first year here (though we’re making up for it in October).
• Gotten involved and met more people at our new church.
• Generally felt like we finally belong here.

Not that Washington, DC is “Home” yet, but it’s our home for now. We’ve learned to appreciate the opportunities here in DC and how to deal with the crummy parts, like traffic and overcrowding. Being settled in our own house and finally having friends and being involved in a church has helped us reorient and figure out what our new chapter of life looks like. It’s ever changing still, but that keeps life interesting, right? It will be interesting to reflect on the coming year next October to see what year two in our house and year three of Washington, DC, look like.

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Progress toward an organized garage

When we moved to our house, we had dozens of boxes of tools plus gobs of other random stuff lining every shelf and wall of the garage. As we worked on projects, tore out old stuff, and purchased new materials, it got another layer of disaster on top of the other. We somehow managed to find stuff we needed for projects, but it was a mess, and the winter was just too cold to tolerate being out in the garage long enough to get anything done. With summer finally here, we were finally ready to implement an efficient storage solution.

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Eight months: love it when a plan comes together

The last month has been really productive, particularly around the very end of May and beginning of June. Things have slowed down a bit, as we have some other stuff coming up that has required more time and mental bandwidth, but we’ve still made some recent progress.

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A paperwork intervention

As one might imagine, moving two times in eleven months is not conducive to staying very organized. All our worldly possessions lived in and out of boxes during our move and our time renting. When we bought our house, we initially found temporary homes for all our stuff and boxes, but the process has been very slow. However, since we moved, and particularly since the beginning of spring, we have been on an organizational tear. From craft supplies to tools, spices to paperwork, Bart and I have been taming the beast and getting back to an efficient and functional household.

One of my ongoing projects is dealing with all the paperwork. Starting a new job, registering cars in two states, and buying, selling, and renting homes generates a mountain of paperwork that piles up in the blink of an eye. I managed to stay afloat until we made our final move, but was clear that our files needed a major intervention. My method of filing paperwork for many years was to use hanging files in a dedicated file drawer. I had a folder for each utility and financial account and for other categories like health records, receipts for big purchases, and school info. This worked pretty well, but with a big life change some of the files were a bit outdated–for instance, we have new utility providers and I no longer am in school–and it was time for a refresh.

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Spice it up

As you can probably tell, I am fond of cooking. Over the years, my recipe repertoire has expanded, causing me to expand my collection of various spices. While I don’t have anything terribly exotic, having a variety of options begins to add up, and spice bottles can begin to overtake the pantry. When we got married, I was gifted a spice rack, which seemed like a great idea at the time. However, it had a rather large footprint and didn’t hold many spices at all for the square footage it took up in the pantry or on the counter. Eventually, I began hatching a grand plan for functional and hyper-organized herb and spice storage.

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