House Excavations, green border
family home preservation projects work in progress

House Excavations Continue

by Mary

It has been too long since I’ve blogged. That’s what moving to a new home after 30 years will cause – upending-the-blog chaos.

Hubby and I are in our new home, still working on getting settled. You know what? It feels an awful lot like the months we spent getting our old house ready to sell. That means I can continue using the image tag “House Excavations” at the top of this post for a while longer.

While we found items in our old house that had fallen into the walls, in our new house we have found all sorts of things that were inadvertently left behind. There were pots and baking pans and other random items left in the kitchen, lightbulbs under the bathroom sink, bath towels on the back of a bathroom door, a few random cleaners under sinks and in the laundry room, some games in the basement, and a giant pile of garbage in the garage.

2 metal pots stacked on the left and several baking sheets stacked on the right.
Pots and baking pans left in our new house, January 2023.
2 blue aerosol cans of Lysol disinfectant with white covers on the left and a green and white spray bottle of Scrubbing Bubbles cleaner under a bathroom sink cupboard.
Cleaners left under a sink, January 2023.
Multi-colored bath towel hanging on back of white bathroom door with pink hanger hanging on top of it.
Towels left hanging on the back of the bathroom door, January 2023.
Pile of random garbage that includes a white laundry basket, blue plastic storage bin, and small black Ikea table on top,
Pile of garbage left in the garage by previous owner, January 2023.

Y’all, is it a thing to accidentally leave so much behind when moving out of a house? I mean, aside from the garbage, which we’re pretty sure was left because the previous owner didn’t have time to get it out before having to leave. And we know much of this stuff was accidentally left because we’ve had a request to return it to the previous owner.

Are Erik and I just weird? When we were obsessively finishing home improvements and cleaning our house for sale, we went through ever cupboard and closet multiple times to make sure we hadn’t left anything that we didn’t intend to leave behind.

Do we all have so much stuff now that it’s difficult to move without forgetting things? I suspect the answer to that is, “Yes.”

(I am feeling much better now that I’ve blogged. I’ve missed this place!)

2 thoughts on “House Excavations Continue”

  1. Ha! Know the feeling! We left our old house in sparkling condition, and moved into an ex-rental that had been empty for a year. I remember feeling annoyed that I had to clean TWO houses…

  2. Yes, Liz, that’s exactly what we experienced. Christmas Day, after having moved in two days before, I found myself cleaning the oven in order to make a Swedish almond cake. The previous owner had left oven cleaner residue in it. Everything needed a good scrubbing in the house.

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