And, We're In!

We spent the night at our new place last night. It is a wreck. I almost cried when we went to see it Friday after they finished the work. There is crap everywhere. There is no storage. And the hilarious thing is that we don;t even have everything we need. We turned in our government furniture so we have to but a couch, tv stand and book shelves for sure.

The place is about 10 pyeoung smaller than our previous place and because of the layout and lack of storage, we are losing a lot more than that in useable space. Why, for example, did they put three sets of double doors that open outward on to the living room balcony? We are either going to have to look two sets of doors so they are blocked with stuff, or put less out there.

Why, oh why, did they feel the need to put a big hallway in the master suite? Completely wasted, but I guess I can hang some pictures in there.

Our washer and dryer barely fit in the laundry room. There is no cabinet for the detergent, etc. We have to demo the smaller cabinet, extra burner and Korean washer out to make room for the American washer. The Korean washer is too small and takes too long, so I guess that is the trade-off.

The kitchen is small and I don't think all of our appliances, pots, pans, and food will fit. There is no pantry. We may have to have the American fridge taken out and put shelving in its place. I am not making any big decisions, yet, but just trying to puzzle it out.

The shelves in the foyer and bathrooms are very shallow.

There are 4 bedrooms but one of them has no closet. They all have the storage balconies, but they are shallower than the ones at our old place.

So, this is the space we've got which means we have too much stuff.

I've moved through the crying, swearing and avoidance phases (mostly) of this most dreaded and most necessary of tasks. Now, I am onto the action plan.

Most organization experts say you should only touch something once. That does not work for me. Either, I get too overwhelmed to start or I get stuck obsessing about each item. I am a big picture person and work best going from big to small. Large complete vision to narrowing in on the details. The major problem that we had was determining purposes for each bedroom.

When we moved in, we put the master as the master, one room dedicated to the office, one as the guest bedroom and one as the exercise room with Ian and Eva's clothes (like we had in the old place).

The problem with that set up is that this place has a lot less storage than our old place and I want to start working on moving Ian to his own room. I was thinking of getting him a twin bed, but there is no room for an extra bed. The queen sized guest bed used to be for our bedroom (before we knew we would co-sleep and need to up-size to a king). It is a big bed frame and there is no place to store it, so it must remain set up. We are going to out bedrails on it and use it as Ian's bed. It only has a mattress, not a box spring and adding a box spring would make it really high, so I am going to have to figure out a way to get the bedrails on without destroying the bed.

The master bedroom, will, of course be the master. The room without the closet will be the office and craft storage room. The small bedroom with the small closet that has Ian and Eva's clothes in it will be Ian's room (and guest room when we have guests). The larger bedroom with the large closet will be the exercise equipment room and general storage. I do not want Ian alone in a bedroom with lots of extra storage things. The capacity for getting hurt or breaking things is too great. I don't know if my sister and I will attempt to switch those two rooms now or just wait a week until C returns.

Right now, my general strategy--Plan B, since I determined that Plan A, jumping out the window was not a viable option:

1. Do a general sort. Group like with like. This will help see what kind of furniture we need or what we need to get rid of. This will also help clear a space so that we have beds and can perform basic functions during this process.

2. Take out the trash. We moved quite a bit of stuff that should have been thrown out, but we ran out of time.

3. Reduce the amount of stuff we have. We have a lot of stuff that we don't use or need. We have saved the original boxes for almost everything and while I do believe that is a good practice, we just don't have the space to keep that many boxes. Some things, like Ian's bike or basketball hoop really don't need the original boxes to be moved back to the States.

This is going to be a lot of work. A big pain. But, living in total chaos is much worse.

I'll update with pictures later.