Guest Post from Bunny at 86’N It.

I've moved at least every 4 years since I was 16. Germany, Ohio, Philadelphia, North Carolina, Texas, Arizona, New York, New Jersey, and now North Carolina again. All those places in the last 17 years. If you divide it up, it is moving more often than every 2 years. Wow. And that is not counting all the apartment moves in each of those places. I became a maverick at moving. I love moving. I loved whittling my belongings down to what would fit in my Pontiac LeMans.

I've been living at my current address (the crack house) for over 4 years. 4 years, 2 months and 26 days to be exact. And it's getting to me. Big. Time. The amount of stuff we have accumulated and filled this house with is astounding. We moved here those 4 years ago from a 400sf apartment we shared, but have somehow managed to overfill these ~2,300sf in such a short time.

Our first night in the crack house.

Lately, I've been having this fantasy about moving. It has been creeping up on me for probably 6 months, but really came to a head when my sister was cleaning my mom's basement pantry (i.e. grocery store/bomb shelter) and found 11 year old popcorn. 11 years old. Older than all her grandchildren. Said popcorn has sat on a shelf while I moved around to 4 different states. Guess what my mom said: "It's still good!" Straight outta every Hoarder's episode right before the crazy old lady eats a carton of spoiled yogurt. My compulsive moving/ unbelievable desire to purge my belongings might be the result of my mom's slight hoarding issue. Wouldn't you know, I'm 33 and still rebelling?

Problem with my desire to move is I love Asheville, I love my friends, I love my three jobs, and I even love this crack house (most of the time). So lately, I've been dreaming of a new solution: I want to fake move.

Yes, fake move. I want to rent a truck, load all of our belongings into boxes, throwing out Marc's 300 t-shirts, at least half of my 72 pairs of shoes, our hundreds of old magazines and all of the crap tucked under beds and in the basement. 

Then, I want to drive around the block or however long it takes us to realize that we don't need half the junk that ended up loaded into the van. Next, we will park the van where you park vans: the Walmart parking lot. We will live in the van long enough for a cleaning company to completely clean and de-spider, then we will paint all the rooms that need painting. (Rooms like, oh, you know, like the one that still has half-naked lady graffiti or the two other rooms that I only gave one coat to mask the dirt and unidentified stains.) {Note from Michelle… click that last link, I’m loving the pic of Marc with his porn mustache and the graffiti wall in the background.}

Next, we will do the big item: We will organize. We will take stock of all the stuff we have decided not to purge and figure out where every single thing is going to go. I mean every single thing. Extra diaper cream: gets a basket. Our one million black sharpies: in a bin on the new desk. We will raid the Ikea shelving section. We will built Marc the pegboard walls in the basement to hang all our tools on, each with their own outlined spot. (Seriously, it would be like porn to him.)

Image from wallcontrol.com

Finally, we will move back in. It will no longer take me 30 minutes to find the spare AAA batteries. I won't own spices from when I lived in Tucson 12 years ago. And maybe, just maybe I'll be able to sit on the couch for 5 minutes without feeling the insatiable itch to move it all again.

I think she might be on to something with this fake move, I’m in!  Bunny is one of my daily doses of sanity, the friend you can call at 2 am because she goes to bed with her phone, the rock you can lean on when times get crazy, I only wish she didn’t live 8 hours away.  She blogs all of her ‘crack house’ reno projects and cute baby pics over at 86’N It.  You can stalk her on Facebook here and you should, she’s highly entertaining.