Hi sweet ones, Lex here with my very first Bliss post, wheeee! 🙂 By this time, my husband Mark and I have been settled into our new condo for about a month. This was a stressful move for me–well, moving IS stressful–but not just for the usual reasons. We’d only been in our last place for a year and a half, but we decided to move because of certain situations we couldn’t ignore any more. We found a unit of the exact orientation and size, located lower to the ground, in a more populated building, and for cheaper rent.

It was stressful also because I couldn’t believe the amount of crap we’d managed to accumulate in just a year and a half! I freely admit I’m a packrat, lol, but once I get started purging, I’m very good at trimming down stuff to what I can’t live without (I think it’s because of my experience as an editor, lol). Besides throwing out what we didn’t need or what was broken, we also ended up with boxes of stuff we gave away. Quite a number of items had sentimental value, but I’d reasoned with Mark (quite mercilessly, I admit) that if we hadn’t touched these in the year and a half since we last purged, it didn’t make sense to keep them!

Still, I wanted to document how I felt packing them up, so I made this layout:

Materials used:

This Side Up by Heather Roselli

All Worn Out 2 Photograph & Paper Overlays by Penny Springmann

Font: DJB Scruffy Angel

Besides the obvious feeling of freedom at purging so much stuff, I was overjoyed to find old journals of mine from back in college. These are especially precious because they have entries from back when Mark and I hadn’t even started dating. An even bigger bonus: I found tucked within the pages prints of our first and second vacations together (from 2000 and 2003)! I plan on scanning them and other ephemera/memorabilia I found so I can scrap them. As a result of this move, I now have ideas for at least five different layouts unrelated to moving, lol!

In hindsight, I AM grateful for this move, despite the stress (right now I’m still dealing with not having our regular Internet connection). The trade-off though, is my condo has never been cleaner and more organized, and I’m feeling the need to entertain more (I hadn’t before). I hope, if you’re undergoing something stressful now, that you get through it quickly and enjoy a better trade-off after 🙂 Have an awesome Friday! 🙂