Welcome!
Thank you from the bottom of my heart for joining me here at Ellen Marie at Home. I want to invite you into my new home and offer you a drink, a little something to nosh on, and a comfortable seat, so we can chat about all things home.
I make wreaths and floral arrangements, hand-made cards and other paper craft items, love decorating, and have a twisty brain full of fun, practical and sometimes random facts about housekeeping and homemaking. I love craft DIYs, combining bargains and dollar store finds with antiques, and I love to help people solve their home décor dilemmas.
This blog will document the latest chapter in our story – an unexpected move to a new part of the country, a new house with a new style, and all of the fun, exciting, crazy, frustrating and funny things that happen along the way.
We moved to Knoxville, Tennessee in February of 2019, leaving our home of 26 years in Hingham, Massachusetts. “My Husband the Engineer,” also known as “The Mister,” took a phenomenal job at the Oak Ridge National Laboratory, so we put our house on the market and moved a thousand miles south to begin a new chapter.
Sounds all neat and simple, right?
Not so much.
In an amazingly fast and furious 5 weeks, we found a lovely realtor to sell the Hingham house, cleaned out the majority of 26 years of accumulated “stuff,” refinished a bathroom, painted a few rooms, had 75% of our household goods packed up and put into storage, left the staging of said house to our lovely realtor, and stuck a For Sale sign in the front lawn.
In the meantime, I took what was supposed to be the first house hunting trip, during which we bought the very first house we looked at. Our equally lovely Knoxville realtor did show me five properties, but by the end of that chilly, rainy afternoon, I knew there was only one we needed to show The Mister. That was on a Saturday, and by Monday afternoon, we had an accepted offer.
They have 30-day closings in Knox County, so by the end of February, we moved in to our new digs. We bought a mattress, box spring and frame, a couch, and a TV to be delivered the first day we were there. We bought a few plates, some sheets and towels, and table for the TV. Procuring a coffee maker and a toaster proved to be an adventure, but we had the essentials.
As The Mister dove in to his new job, it fell on me to travel between Tennessee and Massachusetts to deal with getting that house up to snuff for sale. We accepted an offer in June, after a couple of really bewildering offers that we couldn’t even consider. In July, we sprung our possessions from storage, and moved everything to the Tennessee house. There were 556 items on the packing list, so unpacking and decorating this house will be a marathon, not a sprint (thanks to our friend Lisa, the author of the blog American Tiny, for that pearl of wisdom.)
We learned a lot about a lot of things, and my hope is that by sharing them here, you can benefit from our experience.
So sit back, take a sip of that beverage, and settle in. I have a lot of stories to tell.
