Moving and Merging

The minimalist set of spatulas, carefully selected from our combined collection.

With the renovated and remodeled kitchen now complete, it is finally time to “move in” to This Odd House.  You may recall that I purchased the property in July, spent a month doing demolition, then packed my possessions and transferred them into a storage and holding pattern, furniture and boxes at their intended final floor destination if possible, and to the basement if not.  Ever since, I have been conducting the renovation of TOH from the command and control center on the first floor, which has itself undergone some remodeling.

In December, Portia moved in to that base camp to help direct the final stages of action, bringing with her the worldly possessions of her former life.  We now had two households of furnishings, packed into half a house.  But this was a temporary condition and we managed to solve the Tetris problem of fitting boxes and furniture into a finite space, leaving almost no gaps.  We located the corkscrew and other survival equipment to get us through the harsh days of sheetrock and sawdust, paint fumes, and plumbing interruptions, and have been improvising meals, laundry, and life ever since.

The dust is still settling, but the flow of workmen and inspectors at early hours has ebbed, and we may now move in.  This means finding those packed boxes from the basement and other storage-hiding places, opening them and delivering them to their proper place in the now-open-for-business upstairs living space.  This has exposed the next challenge:  both of us have chosen to downsize our lives to this modest south Minneapolis house, but we both have our original set of (often several sets of) household items.

A weekend was dedicated to identifying the multiple redundancies and selecting which we should keep, an which to find new homes for.  This was harder than one might expect.  Especially for me, a scientist who cannot destroy gathered data, with a family ancestor whose name translates from German to “packrat”.

Assemblies of kitchen items, not all of which will survive the multiple rounds of draft picks.

A typical scene involved the kitchen floor, completely covered with the full combined arsenals of stovetop cooking equipment: pots, pans, woks, and boilers (double and pressure), rice cookers and steamers, arrayed by size and types: aluminum and stainless, traditional and Teflon,  light and heavy, both in mass and in usage.  The task was to select the set that provided the best range of  cooking functionality, and still fit within the designated drawers and cabinet space.

Even with the delicate acknowledgements of sentimental forces of longtime ownership and use, there were difficult personal choices based on practical uses and technical, esthetic, or quality levels.  I am pleased to say that we navigated this treacherous territory well, and in the end feel that the best choices have been made.  There are some things that are “on evaluation” to demonstrate the correctness of a specific decision, but overall, the merging of two long separate histories was successful.  It helped that we both felt a bit of the embarrassment of riches in the very need to take on this task, and in the interest of achieving the not-so-big life, were motivated to find the balance between utility and nostalgia.

Culling the kitchen accoutrements.