moving in… together

August 6, 2013January 15, 2014 Rachel Atwell4 Comments

After we finished packing up and driving north, we finally made it to Hampstead around 12:30 early Tuesday morning.

It was a surreal feeling walking into our apartment – our first home – knowing this would be the place we would spend at least the first 5 months of our marriage. Once again, I’m grateful for the Lord providing a place for us and giving us exactly what we needed during our time here.

The next morning we made a pot of coffee, a quick ~~run~~ drive to The Bagel Bakery, and then we were all set for move-in day. I asked Gary what time he thought we could have the truck unloaded by and he said 12 o’clock. Psssssh… please. I sort of laughed inside because I knew there was no way we were ever going to unload the whole truck in 2.5 hours, especially with me as his helper. We started working away, finding our groove, moving the bigger pieces of furniture when we reached them, and finally we finished. Oh but wait, there was still my car to unload! Fabulous news on another hot summer day {but this time there were no popsicles involved}. We started unloading my car since we were in our move-groove and once we finished, I looked at the clock and it was 11:30! We came in under his time by 30 minutes. Cue the high fives and cheering…

I still don’t know how we things moved that quickly. Or maybe I do. While everything was in the apartment, it wasn’t necessarily organized in the apartment.

We started looking a little something like this…

and quickly transformed to this. {please note there’s a whole lot of brown wanting to be painted…}

And things always get worse before they get better, right? So one hour later, after opening all of our wedding gifts, things looked, um… beautiful.

But this is where things start to get really fun for me. Now that everything was out – we had to organize it all! I guess you could say I have a weird way of doing things. I don’t mind if I create a total mess in order to get organized, so that’s kind of what we did. There was no way I could go to sleep that night knowing an episode of hoarders could be filmed in my living room.

The rest of the afternoon was so spent putting things away in the guest room, and organizing enough dishes to start a restaurant. See the tabletop?

And after most of our work was done, G decided to take the dinner reins and made a call to Dominos.

Good call, G, good call…

packing up and driving north (atwelladventures.wordpress.com)

Atwell Adventures

packing up and driving north

August 5, 2013January 15, 2014 Rachel Atwell4 Comments

When we finally landed back in Georgia after 26 hours of travel {courtesy of American Airlines delays} and drove back to my parents, I walked up to my bedroom and became overwhelmed. Leading up to the move I was busy with finishing up my responsibilities with my Bible study at Wesleyan, transitioning out of my job, going to wedding showers, and planning for July 7. So while I had time to think about the move, it probably fell lowest on to do list priorities.

Because of our delays, our original plan to leave Monday morning was going to have to be pushed back to Monday afternoon.

Looking around my bedroom that afternoon, I knew that everything had to be moved, as well as the dining room full of wedding gifts we thankfully had received {which I’m still writing thank you notes}.

Monday morning I woke up bright and early, finished a few loads of laundry and we started packing up my car. Once we finished packing the car, Gary left to pickup the moving truck and I began working on my room. He returned about an hour later and Operation Move Out began.

After about two or three hours of loading {mostly by Gary, Dad and Josh}, the dining room and my bedroom were finally empty and our truck was packed. It was so weird to see my room so empty. While we were upstairs, Josh asked me how old I was when we moved into the house and I hadn’t really thought of it until that point. I had lived in that house since I was 6 or 7, and here I was almost 20 years later, getting ready to leave it. And with that came moving away from people I love.

I’ll always remember it was a hot day the day we moved by the popsicles we I was eating in all the pictures.

After saying quick goodbyes, which thankfully happened so fast I didn’t even have time to get emotional, we were off to our new home! I was so thankful to make that ride with Gary and not alone in my car {I imagined myself crying the whole way}. It was a sweet time to anticipate the rest of the move and what was in store… and of course, time for us to make a quick tour of our Uhaul video.

The trip took us about 10 hours total and that was with a stop for dinner with our friends Thomas and Lauren, driving through South Carolina…

and finally into North Carolina!

We were so grateful for a smooth moving day – no injuries, no car trouble, no traffic, and just a little bit of rain. Next up was move-in day and that started bright and early the next morning! Thankfully, Gary had the coffee pot plugged in and ready to go.