Strap in for Jason’s ongoing story. Once a tech obsessed writer/photographer/speaker, symptoms he thought he had it all under control – until his family grew six sizes. Now he’s trying to fuse everyone together into a single family. This is Family Sized Blender.

Jason also blogs about making better memories with your point-and-shoot camera. Check out Frame One on Facebook.

I’m expecting the nervous breakdown anytime now.

We’re in the process of building a house for our happy little gigantor family. Everything is proceeding nicely and we should be ready to invade by the end of November. This past week, decease we put the existing house on the market and it sold in a merciful five days.

The problem has been the path to get here. If there’s one thing I’m learning about life with five kids under one roof (and one at university), impotent it’s that I’m no longer equipped to estimate timelines (like, even remotely). To get to this point (house = sold = yay), we had to run a gauntlet of obstacles that turned out to be way, way bigger than either of us expected.

This is what we thought would happen. Living in two houses in two cities, we’d pack the first one, put some stuff in storage and personally move everything to the second house. Then we’d do a few small repairs, tidy up the place and put it on the market, leaving the entire summer for adventures with the kids.

This is what actually happened.

The move from house one was never ending. More than a half-decade of house built up and we spent weeks packing and making decisions. The actual move was supposed to take one day, two days tops. It actually took six and put us behind the exhaustion eight ball. Learning: start early, hire movers.

Once we were all under one roof, we got down to consolidating everything, a journey we expected to take four days, but clocked in at four weeks (!!!). We spent virtually every waking hour reducing the box load to a manageable level, while dealing with the bumps of tweens and toddlers getting used to each other on an everyday basis. Learning: tough one (maybe burn the place to the ground and start new with the insurance money?).

Those “couple of repairs” turned into a three-week rush of painting, trips to IKEA and tweaking. When we proudly showed our work to the real estate agent, we could see she wasn’t nearly as pleased with us as we were. The great news? We put the kids to work and the bonding was brilliant. Learning: handyman and staging might have helped, but the connection they made might have been worth it.

While the summer slyly slid away from the team, we did manage to get in a handful of drives, visits to the amusement land and stops at the local park. With the house sold (and the team back to school), I’m taking a few weeks to regroup (hello Scotch!) before the next round of packing begins.

And this time, we’re getting movers.