That's the 6 feet under house on Arlington!!! <3 Me loves!

I love that house. I pass by it everyday to work.

well, except for that god ugly golfing statue in the yard.

Thanks Beth, I'm moving soon, and this was totally apropos!

"how the Bush Family are having to..."

should be "how the Bush Family is having to..."

I've always had a hard time saying goodbye to apartments - I cried when I closed the door to my Cleveland apt. even though I was getting married and moving somewhere nicer), but the worst experience I ever had with this is when I moved out of my childhood home. (A problem most people have, I'm sure!)

My dad had designed and built our home and took 17 years to finish it (you can sorta read about it here: http://www.ireport.com/docs/DOC-162344
My mom (who picked out the furnishings, etc.) and dad worked on the plans of the house together and it was a long process that kept changing ... for example when the upstairs kitchen was done, my mom decided she wanted it to be open to the living space so my dad had to tear down the inside walls and start over) and once the house was completed everything went perfectly together.
Anyway, the last few months while it was on the market, I lived in it by myself. One Sunday when I came home from a weekend away with my boyfriend, I found that the new owners had moved in ... a month before they were allowed to! Not only was it devastating to see all my belongings shoved aside and new people living in my home ... but, they had totally junked up the house! Everything reeked of moldy basement garage-sale furnishings and every square inch of my mom's gorgeous rose-print wallpaper in the guest room was covered with basketball posters! Now it's one thing if people do that after you've moved out (and you don't have to see it!) but while you're still living there???!!!

Needless to say, my dad called the realtor that day and went completely postal on them for giving the new owners the keys before the deal was final, and I moved in with my grandma until my new apartment was ready. I never went back there ... I let the movers pick up my stuff.

By the way, I recently let curiosity get the better of me and I looked up my old house online ... turns out it's owned by some pro dirt bike rider or something. Check out what they did to the land!
http://ridgerooms.com/dumphouse.png Part of that track is in the front yard!!!
(the bottom pic was how it looked when we lived there)

When I left a house we had lived in for 18 years, I had some time alone after the movers left as I waited for my husband to pick me up - he had been delayed by an hour.

I walked through the house one last time. Stopping in each room to remember things that had happened in that room. It was not something I had planned to do, but it was a perfect way of saying goodbye not only to the house, but to a whole chapter of our life - we raised our children there, and they had now left.

On a more practical note, I prepared a box for the people who bought the house from us, with the original blueprints (which were 80 years old), the instruction books, guarantees, receipts for all the appliances we left behind. As well as fabric and wallpaper remnants and paint samples etc. Plus, I left a bottle of champagne in the fridge with a note wishing them as much happiness as we had in this house.

I did something similar when I finished clearing out my mother-in-law's house, the scene of many happy times in the life of our family.

Dulcibella ... I love the champagne idea. I must remember that. What a wonderful gesture!

Thank you so much for this post. I have moved about 16 times in my 30-something-year lifetime, and even after all that moving, I grow attached to my room, apartment, or home each time. I've taken pictures and special plants, and I even sold the first home I owned to my brother (speaking of making friends with the new owners). I didn't realize I was saying goodbye at the time, but now I do. Two other things I do are clean up well for the next person and kiss the wall the last time I leave the place as mine. I wish I'd signed my name to the floor rafters in the basements of my last two houses :) Thank you, thank you!

I LOVE that house on Arlington! That is a great house tour walking neighborhood!

I, with my brother, just sold the house in L.A. that my parents bought in 1962. For 47 years, this was my home, even though I moved out long ago to live in NYC. After losing both my parents, cleaning it out and saying goodby to it was the most gut-wrenching experience of my life.

I just went back to L.A. and with my husband. I was tortured as to whether or not I could manage driving back to visit it. It has every memory of my family in it that anything non-human could possible have. I had imagined that I could knock on the door and say hello to the new, young owners and even show them a picture of my mom and dad. But in the end, I couldn't bear it. Instead, my husband and I did drive by. I parked the car in front of the house that is forever a part of my DNA and that will forever be my home in my heart and soul, and I just sobbed. I don't know if I will ever be able to knock on the door and see what the interior now looks like. For now, I need it to exist in my heart and mind as it always was, filled with my parents lives and ours.

Somehow, I don't think that new buyers/occupants/landlord would appreciate you carving your initials in doorframes or trees or ripping up shrubbery before you leave - That's called vandalism/destruction of property.

I've moved all over the world and have lived in numerous places as a result of my father and I being in the Military - I've gone back to see some of the houses that I've lived in - and it's never been a pleasant experience because things are always different from what you remember.

Moving can be stressful, but you eventually learn to look forward to beginning a new chapter of your life and the day that the movers arrive to deliver your household goods is almost as exciting as Christmas.

I heard that Cheney is in a wheel chair because he hurt his back packing and moving his boxes this weekend! That made me SO Happy!

Sydney, that's not nice!
I moved every 2 years or so growing up, it was really fun! We learned to travel light and could pack up and be out in a few days. My husband was just the opposite. He lived in the same place forever. As a couple, we lived in the same house for 17 years and recently moved to another state for better job prospects. It got that moving bug going in me and I wish we had moved sooner!

I like to clean the heck out of my old place before I leave it (and do the same with the new place). It's my way of paying homage and taking ownership of all the things that happened (good and bad) while I was there.

I had to sell my longtime house recently, the house where i conceived my children and brought them up and it was very difficult, even thought as a divorced single mother I was finding it very difficult to keep it and its one acre yard in good shape. I got it cleaned up to sell- and on the day it was sold, I went around with my digital camera and took hundreds of shots of the rooms, basement, garage, and yard, the places where my kids hid, my favorite flowering shrub, even the rabbit hole I always stepped in when mowing the lawn. I did the same right before the final walk thru, empty rooms, the sun filtering thru the french doors... I am so very glad i did that, because only four months after I sold it, the new owners burned it down by accident with improper fireplace use. It was condemned and torn down, and a new house built on the lot. Without the photos, the house would truly only live in my kids and my own fond memory....

It's ok to carve something if it's inconspicuous. The old owners of my place wrote in the cement of our patio. I think it adds character and a bit of history.

When we moved out of our childhood home, my dad converted the house into a duplex. He had all us sign and date the drywall that seperated the apartments. My cousin, who was about 5 at the time stenciled his hand. It's nice to know that those signatures are still there, though we haven't lived there for almost 10 years.

When we bought our house, the garage had decorative paper stapled to just about every surface. We took it all down, with one exception. On one wall they wrote in cut out pieces of paper "Happy New Year 1958". They even added martini glasses and bubbles. I love the history it gives to the house. I can just see the friends all gathered together in the garage for a great party. And it's pretty cool to feel nostalgic for a time when I wasn't even born!

In about a week and a half I'm moving from the apartment I've been living in for the past thirteen years. It's the top floor in an 80-year-old house and I love it to death, but I have to move (long story). I know I'm going to cry when everything is finally moved out and cleaned up, but I like the idea of leaving something behind--I think I'll write something on the wall of the garage. It's lined with old packing cases and there's a note from a girl who signed one wall on the day she and her family left on vacation in the early 1930s.

I took a lot of pictures of my childhood home. But a later move across the country upset me a lot and I've never been very sentimental sinse. I guess I don't really have the same sense of home anymore.

Weirdly my husband is the exact opposite but for the same reasons. He, too, had moves which marked the end of good times. So when I wanted to move out of the cramped little room we rented when we married, he took it to mean that I was leaving the love nest. That was sh*tty because not only did I have to do most of the moving, I felt guilty about doing it.

After I bought my first house, my dad and I put up new kitchen cabinets. On the wall behind one of them, I left a time capsule of sorts - a gallon-sized ziploc bag nailed to the wall with all sorts of my favorite things in it. I put a letter in there to the finders and burned a CD of all my favorite songs (at the time...). I hope somebody finds it someday.

I'll be moving again one of these days and it will probably be the hardest move ever. We had this house built just for us using blueprints my brother drew up over 21 years ago. So, it is exactly the way we wanted it. It's in the country on about 6 acres so we have lots of room outside also. The move will be to an apartment or condo as age makes it harder and harder to maintain a house and lawn this size.

I have no sentimental attachments to any place I ever lived. When I move on, I forget about it.

When we sold our previous place this summer, as part of the staging, I assembled a notebook of all the "before" pictures I took of the exterior before I landscaped and we painted, and I included all the owner's manuals, warranties, instruction sheets, etc. that I thought the new owners would like to have. I intended to leave this out for viewings, but the first couple to see the house bought it, so it just went to them. I, too, was planning to leave champagne, but the wife was pregnant at the time, so I didn't.

By the way, it's stealing to remove plants and things once the sale is made, unless you make arrangements ahead of time and specify in the paperwork at the closing that you intend to keep something. The law says the sale includes everything "installed or planted" in the home or on the grounds, or something to that effect. Obviously portable things (garden gnomes) aren't included, but yard lanterns on poles definitely are. So's grannie's antique chandelier. The best advice is to remove all that stuff before you start showing the place, if you can.

(I made arrangements to go back in the spring for a few of the yellow violet plants I had there -- so when they are blooming, I plan to knock on the door and get a few.)