Move Day 4 - vacating the apartment

By the fourth day of moving we're both exhausted, yet I wake early for no good reason, no cat attacks this time, and spend the hour or two before Beth wakes up in emptying boxes in the kitchen. One feature I really like about this house is that I can close two sliding doors in the kitchen and cut down on any noise that would otherwise echo round the house.

We have one final duty in the old apartment before we can hand in the keys - the clean up.

Actually this isn't too bad, because we've only been there four months, though it feels longer. We drive over in convoy carrying a load of empty cardboard boxes for recycling, and arrive about 11:30am. As we unload these into the dumpsters, Beth gets a call on her Fred Meyer cell phone from Sleep Country, as they are on their way with her replacement mattress. Corks. Her cell doesn't get reception at the new house, and she never got the automated call yesterday confirming the re-delivery. She has to jump back in the car and return home asap, while I start cleaning the kitchen.

Within the hour Beth is back and starts in on the bathroom, while I go to Fred Meyer to gas my car and get a couple of hopefully useful cleaning supplies. It's yet another beautiful sunny day and I wish I could linger, but return to try to clean the oven with some new extra powerful concoction, which is ultimately almost useless. Beth has nearly finished the bathroom and herself, but we continue with hoovering round the edges of all the rooms on hands and knees, dusting blinds, and pulling out the stove, fridge, washer and dryer and vacuuming all the dust bunnies and stray chunks of dry catfood.

By 3:30pm we feel we're there, and Beth finishes the vacuuming by going over the whole carpet again while working her way backwards out of the door, and leaving v-shapes that are so loved by cleaners and apartment rental agencies. Then we go to the office to discover they won't actually check the apartment with us, but will checking it over on Monday and mail us our deposit in a month, or as much of it as we deserve back.

So be it, we hand in the keys and drive home, happy in the knowledge that we had a happy four months there and may never return. It's a nice apartment complex, but we did have noisy upstairs neighbors, and we're looking forward enjoying to our quieter detached house and neighborhood.

Back home we have no really urgent work, but Beth wants to paint feature rail in her hobby room so she can start getting it organised. I work on putting away kitchen stuff, and then my half of the walk-in wardrobe, pulling various clothes out of bags in which they've been stored since August, and finding them new homes on rails, shelves and in drawers. I have far too many clothes, but I'll come back to that another time.