Unpacking. And Stuff.

I spent the first few days furiously unpacking.  Now I feel like I have all the things I need to function unpacked, and that's wonderful.  The kitchen is mostly set up, my bedroom is good to go.  The kids have most of their clothes all put away and after opening way too many wrong boxes, I finally located Bentley's and Kendra's bedding and got it all washed and made up onto their beds.  Since they'd been in sleeping bags since Phase 1 of the move, that felt like a huge accomplishment to me.

Unfortunately, my garage (and most of the rooms in the house) still have SO MANY boxes left to be unpacked:

Which begs the following questions:

-Why do we have so much stuff?
-Do I really need any of it?
-How much can I get rid of?
-Is any of it worth trying to sell?

These are the things I am pondering.  Having just read the book Stuff is either helping a lot, or not at all, depending on how you feel about hoarding vs. throwing stuff away.

This is what my living room and dining room look like right now (sorry it's not cleaner-- what was I thinking taking a picture when it wasn't clean???):

There's another chair in the other corner closer to the camera that you can't see.  We need to get a couch for this room, but that's going to have to wait for a bit.  I cannot tell you how happy it makes me to have another leaf in our dining room table and still have it fit in the dining room.  The buffet is there, too, and you can still walk all the way around the table.  Such space!  Also, I love the rug that I bought off some friends right before we moved.  Craig and I had said we'd need a rug for that room, but that was just going to be on the (really long) list of things we should buy whenever we have some money.  So it was nice to get that item right away!

We finally got an offer on the house, so that was a relief!  It was a bit lower than we hoped, although it wasn't terrible.  We have countered and they came up some.  We had a few other people look at the house today who seemed to really like it, though, so we'll wait and see if either of them makes an offer before we counter again.  It will be awfully nice to have that all said and done and know what we'll actually be taking away from the old house, money-wise.  It will be even nicer when it's finished and we can stop worrying about things like our Whomping Willow tree (or, as Jen nicknamed it, the Swamping Willow) falling apart in last week's thunder storm and needing to be taken down (suddenly my neighbor is quite certain that it's on our property and not her's).  Things like that are a pain no matter when they happen, but it's much worse when you're living two hours away...

Craig starts his new job tomorrow.  I start my first summer with kids and without Craig.  Wish us both luck.  I think I'm more nervous than Craig!