5 Things About Moving to Utah

This post is sponsored by Zevo

It’s now been more than 8 months since we moved to Utah and we’re definitely starting to feel pretty settled in.

Like all our moves, this one has had its own adjustments, but overall, it’s been a pretty smooth move, even with a new school for the two older girls, a new (old) house, and a new climate.

Here are five things I’ve noticed so far about living in Utah:

Winter wasn’t that big of a deal. I mean, am I beside myself with joy that warmer weather has started to arrive? Yes. But I expected to feel just wretched about having a real winter and dealing with snow and ice and frigid wind and it turned out to not bother me all that much (although I’ll be thrilled when I can put the coats away for the summer). Bart, who grew up in Utah, was actually much more opposed to the cold weather than I was and he’s now dreaming of being snowbirds. I’ll keep you posted on how that goes for our family . . .

Utah has a lot of bugs. The downside of warm weather reappearing is that bugs are reappearing too. I don’t know that I ever saw a single bug in our Arizona basement (in fact, we never even saw a single scorpion in 3 years), but the second the warm weather started, I started seeing bugs every single time I went downstairs. This. . .did not thrill me. And it really didn’t thrill my children who acted like every tiny bug was the size of a sedan.

The house I grew up in seemed to have been built on the ant equivalent of New York City because we had continual ant problems (the minute we moved to a house a few miles away? We never had an ant problem again).

And when Bart and I lived in Texas, it was a never-ending battle to keep the cockroaches at bay. We are already both pretty clean people, but we quickly became neat freaks who knew better than to leave a single crumb on the counter or a spill on the floor for more than a moment.

Basically, I’ve had more experience than I’d like dealing with bugs.

I’ve always felt like the two options were using traditional insecticides that work well but make me nervous about all the toxic chemicals I’m spraying all over my house, or using natural products that didn’t actually work very well at all.

So when I learned about Zevo at the same moment that all the bugs were starting to reappear, I was all in. Zevo uses bio-selective technology in their sprays and traps which means they target bugs while being safe for humans and pets. The active ingredients in Zevo sprays effectively kill bugs while their Zevo Flying Insect Traps use a combination of light and heat to attract and capture flying insects 24/7 (I can almost not even type the words “flying insects” without shuddering. I loathe bugs so much).

Basically Zevo is the best of both worlds – safe AND effective and way smarter than bugs. Between Zevo spray and Zevo traps, it takes care of all the bugs in my house, both the ones I can see and (even worse) the ones I can’t see.

You can order them online here and then you can stop feeling panicky every time you have to open your basement storage room (or is that just me?).

Making time for family is harder than I expected. One of the main reasons we wanted to move to Utah was because we have so much family around. But when you’ve lived away from family for most of your adult life, your routines have developed around NOT spending time with family and changing those is not easy. Plus, everyone is not used to having US around, so it takes concerted effort on everyone’s part for us to get together. We have a standing dinner date with Bart’s younger brother and his wife every week, which makes it very easy, but we’ve been less impressive with the rest of our family members.

All this spring weather is beautiful. And allergy-inducing. I never had allergies until we moved to Texas and then I suddenly understood why allergies are a big deal. I didn’t have much trouble with them in Arizona, but here? Whoa. Everything is bursting into bloom and I’m sneezing all day long.

Living in Utah feels pretty much the same. One of the things that’s surprised me about living here is that our lives feel very much the same. I still spend many hours a week at my same desk, typing away on my laptop. My girls still go to school, Bart still goes to work, and overall, our daily life feels extremely similar to our life in Arizona. I think we’re at a stage in life where the vast majority of our living revolves around our home and the six of us, so the location makes less of a difference than it has in other times in our lives when much of our lives revolved around graduate school.

When you’ve moved, what differences have you found surprising? I’d love to hear!

And if spring weather is bringing out the bugs in your home, new or old, grab a Zevo starter kit here, so you can enjoy the warm weather bug-free!

Photos by Heather Mildenstein