Retrospective: Pippin and I Move Out

 In 2007, in April, I bought a house and moved out of my parents' house. At this point I was quite a bit older than people usually are when they first move out of their parents' house, but I simply wasn't ready before. I have read that autistic and aspergers people usually grow up more slowly, emotionally speaking, than people who aren't autistic, and that certainly seems to be true for me.

I was worried how Pippin would take this. He'd spent his whole life in my parents' house, with the three of us. What would he think of a whole new place when new things were always scary for him?

Luckily, I had no deadline to move out or in; I could move in any time after I signed the paperwork, and my parents weren't shoving us out the door. I spent the month before the paperwork would be signed packing up my stuff.

I had collected quite a bit of stuff over the years, to the point where my one basement bedroom (albeit bigger than a normal bedroom) contained enough furniture that when I moved it all into my new house (albeit smaller than a normal house) it all fit quite nicely and I didn't actually buy any new furniture for the house for years. Well, except I did buy matching bookshelves to put my library in. But I gave away many of my bookshelves that held my books in my old bedroom, so it was almost a one-for-one swap as far as the furniture was concerned.

Often I'd look around my house and go, "how in the world did I have all this in that one bedroom?"

Anyway, I brought home cardboard boxes from work, and filled them up with books and stuffed animals and other things, and labeled them and taped them shut and put them against the far wall, slowly building a wall of boxes.

Pippin observed this behavior with growing apprehension. Now he loved cardboard boxes, so once when I was packing, he came up to me and I thought he wanted to play. So I picked him up and put him in an empty but open box I wasn't yet using. It was next in line to be used, and was right next to me. I thought he'd have fun, the way he always did with cardboard boxes.

He gave me this horrified, pitiable look from inside the box. It quite smote my heart and I scooped him out hastily, explaining that I'd thought he wanted to play in there and no, I wasn't going to put him in a box and tape the top shut and put him in the wall of boxes!

Well, paperwork got signed on a Monday. I've never actually felt two such conflicting emotions at the same time. I was thrilled and scared to death! It's a big commitment, buying a house. And I had to sign my name or initials over and over and over again.

And what's with putting it on legal sized paper? Why can't you put the contract on normal sized paper so it fits in my normal sized filing system, instead of having to be filed sideways? Gr.

Anyway ... then Tuesday through Friday I had lots of help. We were painting the house (all except the pastel yellow kitchen since I like a pastel yellow kitchen) while there wasn't furniture against the walls. So each day my mom, one of my sisters who had come to help, and my sister-in-law, and me, all packed our cars to the brim with boxes, and drove separately over to the house (which is less than a mile from my parents' house. Brave I am not).

Then we unpacked the boxes into the middle of each room depending on what they were labeled with, and proceeded to paint for the rest of the day. By Friday, using this method of moving, we had moved all the boxes and all the furniture that would fit in the cars, and had the whole house painted. Saturday my brother brought over his truck and we moved the three pieces of furniture that hadn't fit in the cars (my bed, a desk, and I think the biggest bookshelf).

And then Saturday evening I moved Pippin and myself and we spent our first night in the new house. I unpacked all the bedroom so it looked normal. My big bedroom at my parents' house had been divided (using furniture) so that if you "cut out" the sleeping part of it and transplanted it to the new bedroom, that's the normal I was going for. Pippin always slept with me all night, so I wanted that part at least to be reassuring for him.

I put him down in the litter box in the bedroom's bathroom's shower. It's one of those tiny showers and I'm too claustrophobic to use it as a shower, so that's where the litter box lives. And it's always a good idea to start the cat out in the litter box when you're introducing him to a new space. That way he's exploring "out" from there, and always knows where to return to for necessities.

Pippin slowly explored almost the entire house that first night. It quite amazed me, because I thought it would take him longer. Oddly, the kitchen (at the opposite end of the house from the bedroom) remained a "scary" place for years, even when he'd roam freely through the rest of the house.

He even seemed to love having all this space for just us. He happily found his stuff (cat furniture and toys) and was reassured that his food and water were readily obvious in location.

Like any cat he finds the exact center
of the house and that becomes a favored spot.

His beloved cat furniture
is here, too!

So far from being the traumatic experience I thought it could be for him, Pippin quite enjoyed moving out into a larger space. He checked out the boxes and the unpacked stuff too. It really looked like he knew that these boxes were the same as the ones in my old bedroom, and he was quite satisfied that we had brought all the stuff too.

Like me, he always appreciated having the things he was used to around him, and I think it really helped that I'd unpacked the bedroom completely, making it look the same and, although the walls and carpet wouldn't smell "right" yet, all the stuff (bed, comforter, furniture and clothes) smelled right.

The first exploration run

Although it took me a month to pack all my stuff using the time after work, it only took me a week to unpack it using that same time. It wasn't that my stuff got less somehow during the move. It was that for some reason it bothered me so much to have it all boxed up in this strange place that I just had to get it all unpacked.

And having it all unpacked and the boxes all gone made Pippin happy. He could even enjoy playing in a cardboard box again!