The RevGals pose this challenge:

1. What is the most important room in your home? What requirements do you have of this room? (Sure, you can answer “bathroom,” but we can stipulate that as a reasonable assumption and you can pick the second most important room).
2. What is the least important room in your home? The one you use the least, or are not very picky about?
3. Do you have preferences for your neighborhood? What are they?
4. If your elementary aged offspring were to choose colors for their rooms, would any color be off limits?
5. What is your best piece of packing or moving advice?

Since it’s just the two of us, the house Paul and I have together, our first house with no ghosts or debris left behind from another life is small, and that is fine with us. The dining room, living room & kitchen are all open to each other and I love it. So this area, the dining/living/cooking room, is the most important room. And all my requirements are met: the dining area is a distinct dining area, the cabinets in the kitchen large and plentiful and when I’m cooking, I can still participate in whatever is going on in the living room, which is large enough to prevent claustrophobia and with a wall soon to accommodate a “big-ass TV” to replace the one stolen from Paul a couple years ago in a burglary.

The least important room would be the Office. It’s actually the third bedroom, and here we have a solid wall of books, the desk, printer, office supplies, and everything we don’t want you to see when you visit. Beyond this point, thar be dragons!

Preference on neighborhood is pretty much that it is safe and attractive. Our street is full of cookie-cutter houses, but the surrounding neighborhood looks like it formed over many years, with many different styles of houses and a long, hilly road meandering through it, full of beauty grown by unknown neighbors with green thumbs. Azaleas of every color, climbing, fragrant wisteria, dogwood trees, and of course the ubiquitous Palmetto trees all thrive down and up that road.

Orange would be where I might draw the line, ironic as my daughter graduated from UT-Austin (burnt orange is their color). Or black. Just…. No.

My best piece of advice for packing and moving is: throw away, donate, get rid of extraneous crap! Seriously, if you haven’t seen it in over a year, unless it holds real, genuine sentimental value (it belonged to  or was gifted to you by someone you adored, or from whom you are directly descended), throw it out. Give useful things to Goodwill or some other worthy charity, but get rid of it. If you are, as I am, an American, you already have too much crap in your house and you know this to be true. The argument, “I might use it one day….” holds no water if you haven’t used it in the past year. Get rid of it. The day you move and finally collapse, 18 hours after starting to tote boxes, into your bed, having discovered muscles you’d forgotten about since Anatomy and Physiology class 20 years ago, you will be glad you did.