About 18 months ago, my husband (Mike) and I moved across the Ohio River from Williamstown, WV to Marietta, OH.  We had been buying our WV property under Land Contract, which is to say we paid the seller directly rather than going through a bank.  We began to realize in 2013 or 2014 we were going to have to start downsizing.  I won't say we would qualify for Hoarders show, but we were beginning to look and feel like that at the Williamstown house!!

So, we plotted and planned and worked with a couple of realtors and found a great house in Marietta.  Problem?  Well, the new house was a double lot (good) with a separate 2-car garage with a loft (good) and two garages under the main house (also good).  The main living square footage is roughly 1700, not counting the basement (I think) - good enough.  HOWEVER, the place we were moving from had been a business and had 2800 sq ft of living space and 2800 of basement, 5600 in total.  OOPS!!

MOVE is a four-letter word in the most graphic sense, just so you know. DOWNSIZE is another, only compounding the problem, literally!!

The packing, sorting, tossing, donating, shoveling, and praying began the spring and summer of 2014.  We closed on the new house - a completely empty house that seemed to be large enough for two people, no pets - mid August 2014.  We didn't actually start paying that mortgage till October and didn't start staying in the new house till mid November 2014.

In the meantime, I tried to keep some order out of the chaos by packing a lot of our stuff myself, numbering and cataloging boxes so that we'd know just be looking up a number on the list what each box contained.  I got as far as 150 or so boxes.  Then we decided to call professional movers to finish.

That's for the next installment - what a tale it is, too!!