As of midnight last night, we’re only renting one apartment. Yes at long last our endless, very very badly organized move has come to an end. At least the moving part has.
Yesterday we went back to Raleigh, with a truck full of stuff we’d paid to have moved south but now wanted to dispose of (good use of money there, eh?). Our old place has dumpsters everywhere and dedicated recycling dumpsters and to be fair MOST of the trash was cardboard from the packing boxes, but not all. For example I think I tossed 7 or 8 keyboards in the recycling. (Leaving us with, I dunno, 6 spares, still?)
Our new place we have one large trash can that gets emptied once a week, so using the old place’s dumpsters felt like a handy cheat-code since we’d be up there anyway. Now I’ll have to figure out where I can take big loads of cardboard down here. Wherever that is, I’m sure it’ll cost me.
We did a final bittersweet walk-through of the old place. I won’t miss the actual apartment one bit but I will miss the little backyard where I fed the birds, squirrels and even the deer and foxes who wandered by. (The image at the top of the post shows a deer and a squirrel grazing in the back yard.) The new place has a ‘back deck’ which is a small slab of concrete that faces the neighbor’s back deck and is a pretty busy place. No critters out there!
We hugged a couple of neighbors, pet some doggos, said our goodbyes, turned in the keys and were gone. It all took less time than expected. We’d figured on spending the night up there but got done so quickly we drove back down. I’d taken today off thinking we’d be on the road but instead I had a good long sleep-in. Back to work for the day tomorrow and then on Monday we’re back to the old grind, and honestly I’m not too sad about that. Remind me I said that when I get tired of it by mid-February.
The new place is still utter chaos with boxes everywhere. PartPurple has been sick this week so she hasn’t gotten much done and a LOT of the unpacking is down to her since she is, shall we say particular, about where things go. Anything I unpack she comes along behind me and moves stuff so I’ll just let her orchestrate and be the muscle when needed.
The exception is my office which was so packed full of stuff I could barely move. I’m making progress…I can see the floor here and there now. I’ll work on that some more this afternoon.
Everyone has been doing 2025 recaps, as we tend to do at this time of year. 2025 was pretty awful, eh? For us personally, we lost our beloved dog, and we lost all our money. At the start of the year I had about $16,000 in a “Rainy Day Fund”. My goal was $20K at which point I hoped to start shopping for a house. Then Lola got sick, to the tune of $13K in vet bills. I actually took out a personal loan to pay for some of that since I didn’t want to drain the rainy day fund completely. But then this move has wound up costing us almost $10K because we are stupid. (Moving company was $2500 each trip [2 trips which was the REAL dumb part], a junk collector was $500, cleaners were $500, and then there was the old 1st month, last month, and 1 month’s security downpayment on the new place.) Now the rainy day fund has $25 AND I have a credit card balance for the first time in years. Quite a setback. Goal now is to have the credit card balance paid off by June, then we can start building again.
So yeah, if 2026 can just be dull and boring and not cost me a bunch of money, that’d be great. We’re still rocking a semi-busted TV, PartPurple wants a new couch, and I’d LOVE to get a proper corner desk for my office but… all in good time I guess.
So now we start to find the new apartment groove. Now that my gaming PC is back in my office, I’ve been spending more time on PC gaming since PartPurple has been spending a lot of time in the living room watching YouTube on the TV I generally do my console gaming on. I thought about moving the consoles into my office but she says she doesn’t think this new habit of hers will last and that once HER office is set up and not a room full of stacked moving boxes, she’ll be back to working on projects up there. So we’ll see.
I do kind of LOVE having my own office, though. Or I think I will once I have it organized and have purged more stuff. So much junk! For example I have SIX PC towers in the closet (plus two actually running, one work, one gaming) and a stack of 7 or 8 old laptops (aside from the ones we actually use). I have a box of old hard drives I need to wipe before I get rid of them… just so much crap. A few 50′ ethernet cables, tons of coax cables. Switches and hubs that are so old that aren’t gigabit. Stuff like that.
The long term goal is to keep purging stuff and get to where I have room for a project table where I can do thinks other than tap away on a keyboard.
Anyway, we’re so very, VERY happy to be done with this move. I’m hoping this isn’t one of those places that gets you in at a good price then jacks the rent up the first time you need to renew your lease, because I don’t want to move again for at LEAST 5 years!!!
I am ALSO very happy you guys have completed your move!
Grats on getting it done. It’s bizarre how old computers stack up, isn’t it? We have two we use all the time plus my laptop but there are two more functioning laptops put aside, two functioning PCs and at least two non-functioning tower cases with most of the parts still inside. And that’s after I had a purge last year and got rid of two or three more. I actually don’t know exactly how many we still have or how many still work. As for hard drives, graphic cards, ram and so on, I’ve got everything we’ve ever had since the mid-90s. I keep thinking of EBaying some of it but it always seems like more trouble than it’s worth so it just sits there. We basically can never move now because of the huge amount of stuff we have.
We’re getting better about accumulating old PCs now that Moore’s Law seems to be running out of steam and we don’t feel ‘out of date’ after a few years. Most of these old towers have to be 15+years old at this point.
And same thing with ebay, and from what I’ve read we’re not wrong. By the time you factor in shipping and ebay’s cut, it probably really isn’t worth our time to try to sell this old stuff, unless it’s something collectible. But cheap old junk doesn’t seem to be worth running through the system.
To say the least, wishing PartPurple and yourself a much better 2026, Pete.
Glad the move is over and you’re into more of a settling phase now- well, once PartPurple is feeling better!
For what it’s worth — I think making a move like this as easy as possible on yourselves, even at higher cost of movers etc, is money well spent. To say the least, it is a stressful time, anything you can do to minimise that is OK. Although I know that won’t help too much on the stress of the reduction of the rainy day fund until you’re able to start building that back up again!
Our biggest screwup was not having the movers take everything the first time. We thought we’d save money by doing it ourselves but that turned out to be way more than we could handle, so we had to call them back. Each visit was $2500 but of that, $1700 was based on distance, not weight. So I’m thinking if they’d taken everything at once it would’ve cost us $3200 or so instead of $5000.
But it’s all self-inflicted and I’m pretty sure I’ll remember this next time we move!!!
Congratulations on completing the move! I’m always surprised at the amount of ‘stuff’ we accumulate, we move every 3-5 years, and I have all of my life, so I’m quite used to it – having said that, I’ve never attempted to move on my own without movers. It is stressful enough! I hope you guys are able to settle down some great roots. Have fun with the new space!
We have DEFINITELY learned our lesson about the trying to save money by minimizing the movers!!!! LOL!
Grats on the move! I dread moving more each time I do it 🙁 I definitely feel for you there.
We were 13 years in our last place. 13 years from now I’ll be closing in on 80, if I’m still kicking, and will be living off a fixed income so I’ll probably be moving into a nice cardboard box under an overpass or something!
I just hope the rents don’t go up like mad here. I didn’t realize how quickly the area is growing/being developed. The locals HATE it and hate everyone moving in. Just like I hated everyone moving in to my home town when I was the local!!