A Week of Moving

What a whirlwind the past seven days have been.

Last Sunday was moving day. We weren’t done packing everything when the movers arrived, but I’m not sure that anyone’s ever completely ready to move. By the time the moving company backed their trucks into our driveway, we had packed most of the big stuff and we packed most of the small stuff. We had packed most of the things we wanted to keep, and a lot of the things we had planned to part with. We packed and packed and packed. First we ran out of boxes. Then, we ran out of time.

When we moved into our current house back in 2011, it took a single 20-foot moving truck to hold all of our possessions. Seven years later in 2018, we needed two 24-foot trucks to move all of our stuff. Everything everybody says about filing the house you own with stuff is true (after all, houses are just places to keep our stuff). I honestly didn’t realize how much stuff we — and by we, mostly I mean I — owned. Having everything you own spread out throughout a giant house on shelves and in closets is one thing; you don’t really appreciate how much it is until you’ve seen it all together in one place, like the back of a moving truck.

It took four guys (with amazing cardio) roughly five hours to fill both of their trucks and another three hours to unload them. There wasn’t much for me to do while the trucks were being loaded, other than stand around and worry which of my things were about to be broken. Unloading was a different story. The pace changed, and all of a sudden four guys were rolling past me with boxes stacked on top of dollies, whizzing by at a breakneck speed as we tried to direct traffic and get the majority of the boxes back into the corresponding rooms, or at least as close to their final destinations as possible.

To make identifying boxes easier, I used strips of white duct tape affixed to the side of every box and noted the contents with a black marker. Even before the movers arrived, the tape had begun to peel away and fall off of the boxes. By the end of moving day, over half of the boxes were unlabeled. For what it’s worth, the tape also fell off of the sides of the plastic tubs I used to store my Star Wars collectibles. To the best of my knowledge, tape is only designed to do one thing — stick to stuff. Note to self: next time, don’t buy the absolute cheapest duct tape available on Amazon.

For as fast and furious as the unloading process went, surprisingly few things were broken. The trim on our armoire was broken off and Susan’s Buddha statue was decapitated, but those were the only big casualties. I have noticed over the past couple of days that lots of our cheap desks and shelves are in bad shape. Mostly I’m talking about those cheap bookshelves; those ones from Walmart that don’t feel terribly sturdy the minute you assemble them. Most of the ones I own came from thrift stores and garage sales and had already been moved once or twice. One set, some old black shelves that were in my Star Wars room, literally collapsed into a pile when touched, as if it were a witch and someone had just thrown water on it. What a world, what a world…

Sunday night was the first night I slept at the new house, and that made it official. That night, the new house became our house, and the house we’ve been in for the past seven years became “our old house.”

Moving, it turned out, was just the beginning. We spent most of Monday unboxing and arranging things, but I’d guess less than 25% of our stuff has been unboxed. No time for that at the moment. On Monday, painters arrived at the old house and spent three days covering the walls with a fresh coat of paint. Yesterday, a bricklayer arrived to repair some bricks that had cracked on the facade of our house. Also, due to either a miscommunication or a limitation of time and/or space, the movers left a lot of things behind. My friend Tim and I spent five hours one day moving almost everything that remained upstairs down to the garage for sorting. In a few days, we’re having new carpet installed.

Over the past week, nobody has worked harder than Susan. Even on days when the rest of us have been too sore to move, Susan’s been carrying wheelbarrow loads full of dirt into the backyard to fill holes the dog dug, and moving multiple loads of stuff every day between the two houses. All of this has been on top of her working roughly 50 hours a week right now. When everything is said and done, I’m afraid she’s going to collapse for a month.

I forgot how mentally and physically exhausting moving is. We are shooting for 11/4 for our first official open house. The finish line is in sight. All we need is enough coffee and Advil to make it there.