We are now less than a week from our move-in date and I cannot wait to be in the new house. I hate moving and packing (though I do enjoy unpacking, organizing, and arranging), and this is one of the slowest moves ever. I fee like we’ve been moving for weeks already. I prefer packing everything during the days before a move and then moving everything all at once. What we’re doing, however, is the slow and painful process of moving a carload of small items at a time, putting them away, and then reusing the boxes to move more things. It’s agonizing.

Before we moved anything, however, we made a huge trip to Lowe’s for paint, a refrigerator, and some other supplies. After a half day taping and a full day painting, our living room and hallways were all this lovely color:

That’s Sherwin Williams “Morning Fog” you see there.

Unfortunately, it was not meant to be. The color had come out a little bit darker and bluer than we had intended. I still liked it and was fine with it, but my husband, the most picky and meticulous person I have ever met, simply could not take it.

The next morning found us back at Lowe’s buying “Olympus White,” a color two shades lighter on the strip (on the bottom in the above image). We brought it back and tried it and … it was too light. Back at Lowe’s, we then tried the color in between the two, “Latitude” (on the top in the above image). It was perfect. Over the rest of the day, we painted over everything we’d already done, taking it one crucial shade lighter to the pale gray (not slate blue!) we’d intended. I wanted to cry about the whole situation — a full day’s backbreaking work, all for NOTHING! — but it really does look better now.

When I say the work was backbreaking, I pretty much do mean that literally. I’d been having some minor SI-joint issues lately and after two days of painting, I could barely move without feeling like I was being kicked by a steel-toed boot directly in the butt. Not only was it painful, but imagine explaining this to your chiropractor. He couldn’t stop laughing at me.

My husband had to finish the rest of the painting himself, including the dining room and guest room (more “Latitude”), the kitchen accent wall (“Parakeet”), and the master bedroom (“Olympus White” and “Blue Jasmine”). He really didn’t complain at all about having to do the rest of it himself, even though I’m sure it was not necessarily fun. I spent the time resting my back and doing some light packing and such at home.

It’s been pretty fun for us to think about how we’ll set up the new place — everything from choosing paint colors to deciding where to hang our art to (finally) merging our big book collections is a fun project. I keep getting excited anew when we bring items from our current house over to the new one and they suddenly seem to look better and nicer in our new place than they ever have in our current one. Our old rug, for example, looks so much prettier in our light an airy new dining room than it ever did in our dark and shadowy current living room. A painting of CW’s which I’d always thought of as drab and dreary is suddenly light and exciting in the brightness of our new living room.

We generally like the same colors and styles, with minor differences of opinion here and there. For example, we both think this gorgeous rug from Anthropologie would be perfect in our living room. Sadly, it is both ridiculously expensive and unavailable anyway. Damn you, Anthropolgie.

The problem is that when it comes to picking the next best available rug, we have some differing tastes. More critically, we’ve been unable to agree on the size of the rug. I’m a huge proponent of the idea that at least the front legs of the furniture should sit on the rug, thereby having the rug tie the room together and ground everything. My husband, who loves our hardwood floors, wants the rug to float in the middle of the furniture, with only the coffee table on top of it and the edges freely uncovered by couches/chairs. He says with a larger rug like I’d prefer, we’d be covering up the wood floors too much and the rug would become tantamount to a carpet. I contend that a small, floating rug in the middle of No Man’s Land would look chintzy, cheap, and amateurish. Neither of us seems willing to compromise at this point, no matter how many interior design articles I show him. Please keep us in your thoughts during this difficult time.

The moving truck comes for our furniture on Saturday. Deep breaths.