It’s finally happening: after years of discussion and seemingly endless back-and-forth interactions with the city planning department, we are finally beginning construction on a renovation of the home we’ve lived in since 2002. Our permit was issued on September 16, just five days before the start date we had set with our contractor, September 21. The fact that the permit went through on time was one of the few things that has gone right, schedule-wise, for this project: we started talking about adding onto the house all the way back in late 2017, with the hope that we’d be moved in by the middle of 2019. We are a bit behind schedule.

Of course, in order for construction to begin, we had to vacate the premises. Our official moving day was Tuesday, September 8, when a crew of movers arrived to take our furniture over to the house we’ll be renting for the next year. We chose that day because it fell just after the long Labor Day weekend, which we thought would give us a chance to get most of our non-furniture possessions moved ahead of time so that the kids could attend school online from the new place and avoid missing classes.

This plan mostly worked. Tuesday morning, Julie got the kids up early and ferried them over to the new house, where the Internet was mostly functional (more on that another time); I stayed behind to meet the movers and let them know what was staying and what was going. They spent four-ish hours loading everything onto two separate trucks and broke for lunch before heading off to deliver the load. I headed straight over to the rental to help Julie stick felt pads onto the feet of all our furniture so that it wouldn’t scratch the polished wood floors and to let the movers know where everything was supposed to go.

That part of the move went fairly smoothly, mask discipline on the part of the movers notwithstanding, but there was still quite a bit of stuff to pack up at the house even after the movers came and went. Fortunately, we had a couple weekends to clean up these loose ends before the contractor was due to show up and start knocking down walls. Even with that buffer, however, things came down to the wire: we drove away from the house with our last load of stuff at 1:30 in the morning the night before demolition was due to start.

We’ve posted a few pictures highlighting the process from the day movers came to our final moments in the house, with a few pictures of Julia’s room from before this all happened for the sake of comparison.

Gallery: Preparations and Moving Out