Getting to Know Your New Home
© Lisa Hart Daily
You might pause at the entrance, looking at rooms that you have only seen occupied with the previous owners' furnishings. They look disturbingly empty, the walls bare except for random nail holes from the previous residents' pictures, and anxiousness to fill the rooms may take hold.
The movers bring in your boxes and furniture and place them in the proper rooms, alleviating the anxiety a bit. But then they leave, and you are faced with cartons of pots and pans, computer accessories, picture frames and everything else. It presents a happy challenge, to consider which kitchen cabinet is the best for cups and glasses, and to place your own towels in the linen closet. Most likely all these things that need to be done are not accomplished by the end of moving day. It may be weeks before the last box is emptied. It may be even longer before you really feel settled here.
It does take time to feel at home in a new place. This makes sense, because the rooms, the balcony, and the neighborhood are unfamiliar at first. We need to live in a space, get to know the nighttime sounds and the daytime traffic jams on the way to work, for these things to become familiar and part of the background of our lives.
Know the neighborhood
It is nice to be "in the know". At your previous home, you probably had a favorite restaurant, and knew the back roads that would bypass some traffic lights.
It is helpful to get to know the new town. A Saturday drive around nearby roads is a way to get oriented. Shopping at two or three local supermarkets and finding out which you prefer gets you on the road to a routine, as does figuring out which pizza parlor makes the best pizza and which dry cleaner has the best prices. Get a library card. Memorize your zip code - nothing made me feel like such a newbie each time I moved as not knowing my own full address!
Residents in an apartment or condominium have great resources for familiarizing ourselves with the neighborhood. Often, management companies hold events, such as community yard sales and holiday parties, and condominium residents can attend association meetings - excellent places to get to know neighbors, as well as participate in decisions that will affect the community. Newsletters from the management office can seem like boring reading, but peruse them to find out about upcoming events and any issues concerning the property.
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