I've decided to decorate my dining room in a style I call "cardboard box"...

When you first start planning a move, you have grand ideas that you will have the best and smoothest move ever. Sure, everyone complains about moving, but you are different. Everything you own will be neatly catagorized in boxes by room, size, location, item type, and color and will be promptly unpacked and stored exactly where it belongs.

And when you first start packing, that's they way you pack. But as you get closer to move day, you find yourself straying off this path - having boxes that just say "stuff" or having boxes that contain, say, half dishes and half computer parts. And when you actually get to moving day, you discover that you've run out of boxes and start putting stuff in paper bags and duffle bags.

And unpacking is the same way. The important stuff gets unpacked quickly and put where it belongs. But after a while, your goals change. You no longer feel the need to get everything unpacked. Your goal becomes to get all the boxes of stuff you haven't unpacked hidden. And after a while, you wonder if you really need to do that, or how long you can just leave a pile of boxes in the dining room and explain that you just moved in. That works in the first couple weeks, but that excuse wears thin after a month or two.

That's the stage I'm at right now. I've gotten most of my stuff unpacked, but I still have a bunch of boxes of stuff, most of which goes under the catagory of either "well, I might concievably need this someday" or "why the heck did I bother packing this crap". Most of my rooms are pretty settled except for a stray box or two, but my dining room and hallway are a mess of boxes. My laundry room is too, but that's kind of the idea of having a laundry room.

So now I don't plan to unpack everything. I just need to get the computer parts that are in my basement laundry room stowed in the closet of my 2nd bedroom that I use as an office, and hide all the boxes that are in my dining room in the laundry room. This plan will work for the next few months, but some of those boxes in the laundry room have winter clothes and the like, so come November I'll be frantically moving boxes trying to find sweaters and the like.

And then there are the little things that I keep putting off. I still don't own a dining room table, and Ikea raised the price of the one I plan on buying while I procrastinated buying it. I still haven't put back the faceplates on the rooms I painted, mostly because I'm convinced that I will someday replace all the electrical outlets, something I have yet to do. I've also put off replacing the sconces in my bedroom, so I still have two holes in the wall and a wall switch that doesn't do anyting.

And my air conditioner still is leaking water like crazy, and I keep wondering how long I can put off replacing the condenser.

Ahh, the joys of home ownership.....