Settling down and settling in
Finally moved into a place in Atlanta!
Welcome to another week of life on the road life in one location. I’m Genie Leslie, a freelance writer working remotely and traveling the country with my husband in Atlanta, Georgia.
This week (and month), we’re unpacking and settling in to our new rental.
Y’all.
I did not mean for more than a month to pass before I wrote again. Honestly, I’ve had this post in mind for weeks—a post about how we moved our stuff across the country and into our new home—but life had to catch up to what I wanted to write. The process took so much longer than expected, and we just actually moved into our new place on April 12, six days ago from when I’m writing this. Finally!
Since I’ve used this newsletter to explain the logistics of our traveling life, whether financial, packing, or unpacking, I thought I’d fill you in the logistics of this final leg of the journey.
The last time I wrote, I talked about knowing where we wanted to land and starting to plan for being in one place. And I mentioned starting a new freelance gig, which I did on February 26. I started the new job in Oxford, at my mom’s house, while we all gathered for my sister’s play being produced there (it was great! She’s an awesome playwright). And on March 4, we landed back in Atlanta.
With the new gig underway, I worked every day and Aaron took on the job of house hunting. In the first week and a half, I think he toured something like 10 houses. If it was an automatic no, he’d just get out of there. If it was a possibility, he’d film a walkthrough so I could see it and we could discuss.
We really wanted a house—a standalone house with a yard for a future dog. We looked at several. Our price range, being based on one income instead of two, was a little limiting, but we still had so many more options than we would have in Seattle. The houses we could afford in the neighborhoods we liked were either too small or in a weird location (off the busiest street imaginable, or in a dead zone between neighborhoods).
We didn’t completely rule out townhouses. We looked at one together the first weekend, but didn’t like it. Then we looked at a second one together the second weekend. We thought, well we’re not super excited about townhouses, but we’ll check it out because the location is good, and then we’ll move on.
And then…we liked it. The townhouse itself was fine—an eerily similar layout to the one we had in Seattle, but bigger. Where our last place had a kitchen and living room on one floor, this one had a kitchen, living room, dining room, and outdoor balcony. The bedrooms were much bigger, and there was a third downstairs room off the garage. This place had two full bathrooms and two half baths, as opposed to our last one’s one full and one half.
We rushed home and got the application completed, just in time for me to completely give in to the cold that was settling into my head. Within 24 hours, we were approved. We briefly reconsidered. We looked at it so fast. Do we really want to be in a townhouse again?
Aaron had one more house viewing scheduled the next day, and he did go. It was huge for us; something like 2100 square feet. Huge yard. But it was in a weird location, one of the in-between dead zones, and, honestly, almost too much house for us. We worried about being able to even fill out the space.
Plus, the townhouse had a pool. Not just for us, of course, but for the community of about 30 houses. I loved having access to a pool at our spot in Mercersburg, PA last August. With summer on the horizon and temperatures already rising, a semi-private pool for the summer sounded pretty incredible.
We signed the lease on March 18. And that’s when we began looking into the long-distance move with PODS.
Let me give you a few tips about this in case you ever find yourself in a similar situation. We assumed that we shouldn’t reach out to PODS or book anything until we knew where we were moving; we’d need to give them an address for the final shipping destination. Turns out, this is not the case.
When you use PODS for long-distance moving, your POD will stop at several locations. First, it will be delivered to you—your house, apartment, or, in our case, storage unit. You will take however long you need to pack it up and then someone will pick it up whenever you tell them to. Next, it will go to a storage location in your area. Then, it will be picked up and begin its cross-country journey. But it won’t be delivered straight to your door. It will go first to a local storage location in your new area. What this means is, we could have booked, packed, and shipped our POD before knowing where our rental was, because it would’ve just made its journey to Georgia and then been stored in Georgia until we scheduled it for our final address.
Not knowing this, though, we booked our POD for as soon as possible after we signed our lease, which was March 29, and planned our travel. We’d fly into Seattle on Thursday, pack up the POD on Friday, and see a few friends on Saturday before heading back on Sunday (I had to work again on Monday). It was much faster than we wanted our first trip back to be, but with me being the only one working, I didn’t have the luxury of taking much time off work.
I could bore you with the details of three separate trips to Home Depot in one day, but at the end of the day, we got the POD packed up in about 4-5 hours, with the last hour and a half just focused on getting those last random items in and getting everything strapped and cushioned tightly enough to survive the journey (we learned that couch cushions and those rubbery gym floor squares are great moving cushions).
We had dinner with friends that night, and we reminisced about how much we miss our original Seattle neighborhood, Ballard. (We haven’t lived there since 2019, because we moved to West Seattle when we bought our townhouse. We never fell in love with West Seattle, though it was not at all helped by the pandemic, the bridge shutting down for years, and our reactive dog isolation.) On Saturday, we had brunch with a friend in the morning, and saw friends on Saturday afternoon, but we were fading fast—the exhaustion of travel and packing was setting in. We spent Saturday night watching Netflix and trying to stay awake until a “normal” bedtime, and then Sunday we were back on a plane to Atlanta.
The big surprise came when we called PODS to schedule our final delivery. Even though our initial consultation with PODS had said that our stuff would arrive 8-11 days after pickup, the date they gave us now was April 13—a full two weeks from the pickup day.
At this point, our lease had started, and our time in our Airbnb would end before the POD arrived. We’d have to move in, without our bed. Or our desks for working. We got the delivery date bumped up a day, to the 12th, but that was the best they could do.
We ended up getting really lucky though. The people staying at our Airbnb after us cancelled, and our host, who knew we were in the process of moving and finding a rental, gave us three extra nights in the Airbnb for free to get us over that transition period between places. We also went ahead and ordered a new bed to be delivered to the townhouse—since we now had two bedrooms that we could use as bedrooms, we’d need a second bed anyway.
The best thing we did, the final treat for ourselves, was to hire movers for moving in. We cleaned out the storage unit by ourselves, with just the two of us, and most of it was fine. But the mattress was so heavy and we really struggled to move it even the short distance from storage unit to POD. (Honestly, maybe don’t go with Purple mattresses for this reason alone. They don’t even give you handles!) So in Atlanta, knowing we’d have the lovely townhouse experience with two flights of stairs, we hired help. With two movers plus me and Aaron, the POD was cleaned out with everything in our new place in one hour. Easiest move we’ve ever done (I mean, that portion of it anyway).
We gave a lot away before we left Seattle and only stored the essentials (or what seemed like the essentials at the time…). Now that we’re here and in a bigger place than before, we’ve got some furniture needs to fill. So we made the brilliant decision to go to IKEA the day after we moved. But I have to give myself and Aaron credit—this was our third IKEA trip as a couple, and the first time where we didn’t fight or end up in bad moods. A win! Plus we got some lamps and a desk chair for me. Hoorah!
What else is going on?
I finished a draft of my new feature! I wrote last time that I’d joined a workshop for writing a draft in 8 weeks, and I did it. Now that draft is with a few readers, and I’ll be working to revise it soon.
Another script of mine reached the quarterfinalist round (so far) in a screenwriting competition, so that’s nice. Contests are kind of crap shoots, and certainly not the best way to determine your script’s value, but it’s definitely nice to get the little dopamine boost and to know your script resonated with someone.
I got my gym set up in the garage (with previously mentioned gym floor tiles). It’s the exact same setup that I had in our garage in Seattle, but I’m going to need more fans here to fight the Georgia heat.
Oh! And I accepted a long-term contract role that begins in May. I’m really relieved, since the job market has been so tough lately. It’s a 12-month contract with possibility to extend up to 18 months, and it comes with benefits and paid holidays. I’ll take it (and I did).
So what will happen with this Substack?
I don’t really know. I’m obviously no longer “Traveling Genie” (I hate that title, I’m so bad with titles). And I have enjoyed this format for writing, though at times it did pull my focus from screenwriting in a way that I didn’t enjoy. I have at least one more post coming after this, but then I’m not sure. Maybe I’ll find other topics to write about, or maybe this will just live as a nice little archive of our 19 months (!) of the traveling life. Either way, I really appreciate you following along.
Glad to know you settled in Atlanta. Praying for Aaron to find a job soon. Congratulations on your new gig 🩷
Hope you find a way to stay in touch with your followers!
Love ❤️❤️