For not much other reason than The Bloke got a bee in his bonnet about the rent increase and the potential for a decent driveway that goes INTO a garage, we’re moving house.
Granted, it’s thirty bucks a week cheaper, it’s got more space AND a four-car garage that will happily accomodate all of our spare/camping/kids crap AND a car, but I still hate moving.
Over this weekend The Bloke has been tackling the junk in the shed, whilst I had the task of doing the books and shoving misc stuff into boxes. Currently, after three trailer-load trips to the tip, we have 24 boxes of shit strewn about the house, in hallways and any spare space and I STILL haven’t managed to attack the kitchen, laundry or bathroom yet! Bedrooms come last of course, and followed even later by all the crap in the shed.
The rooms are bare except for major furniture bits, and the walls are similarly naked of decoration. And we have to live like this until next Friday when the removalists come. Fuck.
I so hate moving house. There ought’a be a law against it I reckon.
I hate moving too! Hate hate hate! I would pay someone to do it for me, but I am such a bad house keeper it would take me nearly as long to clean up as to pack…
Hate to disappoint you An Arky, but ‘arsonist’ is not at all amusing in the Australian lexicon. I get the word association bit, but unfortunately, because of our high tendencies towards dry-stuff and bushfires, when the word arsonist is mentioned people just groan and hope to buggery the shithead is caught quickly before he does even more damage.
I have moved something like twelve times in the past ten years. Yes, literally more than once a year. I have the horrifying potential to have to move again here soon, and I really do not want to.
What’s worse is that this possible move comes right on the heels of my having just helped a friend move. I spent five days helping a friend pack and organize and box and so forth, and now I find myself looking at my stuff and going, “Damn it!”
I don’t want to get rid of more stuff to move again. I don’t want to pack again, and I don’t want to haul again.
Moving is terrible. However, I’m glad you’re getting cheaper rent and more space and a four car garage. That’s definitely something.
At least you’re only moving across town. Me and the missus are moving clear across the country this summer, from Baltimore to San Diego. And we still have to actually find a place to live, in an area that i’ve never been to, and that my wife’s been to once for about a week.
We’re going to try to minimize the amount of heavy shit by selling or throwing out some stuff. We have two couches that have seen better days, and we figure that it will be easier to get rid of them and buy one new couch on the west coast, rather than haul them 3000 miles. Same with some of our crappy old bookcases and cabinets.
The pain of moving will be alleviated somewhat by the fact that her new job is forking over $4000 to help with moving expenses. That sounds like a lot of money, and it will definitely make life easier, but we’re still not sure it will cover all the expenses.
And it’s the pain of packing every single thing you own into boxes that really sucks. It just takes so damn long.
In the first 7 years of our marriage, we had 5 different addresses, including the year we lived aboard our boat. Oh, how I hated packing and unpacking!! Since that move in 1990, we’ve lived in 3 other houses (plus one other boat) and when we bought this place, we declared that this would be it till we’re wheeled to “The Home.”
Honestly, the only way I’d leave this place would be if we hit a super lottery and could hire someone else to do all the packing, unpacking, decorating, and settling in. Nope, this is it.
Not to mention unpacking, at which point you realize just how much crap you have and no wonder you could never keep the old place neat (the new place inevitably following suit in about a week).
University was fun, what with moving twice a year, and of course I could never manage to get everything in one trip.
This was, I think, my fourth move in two years. One of those moves was about 2200 miles, as well. I’m not planning on moving again unless I want to leave town (probably for Portland or thereabouts), and I don’t see that happening for several years.
About the only advantage to having to have a post office box for mail is that I don’t have to go through the hassle of changing my address with the post office. Again.
I’m not wild about moving my stuff, but I don’t mind helping others move. As long as they’re packed and ready to go, I’ll be there. Thankfully, after years of helping others move, we were lucky enough to have twenty-two of our friends help grunt and lift for our last move. (Twenty-four if you count the two people who helped auntie em cook food at our new place, so that we’d all have something to eat when we arrived.) It took about two hours to load up, and it went even faster unloading.
But, yeah, actually packing your stuff is tedious and takes too long. I’d never give up our books, for example, but it’s very tempting to do so when you’re packing and you realize, after the three hundredth box, that books take up more than their fair share of space in the moving truck.
We used movers about 20 years ago, Washington State to Iowa, and it cost about $1800. I don’t know if they charged us by weight or space*. We didn’t move appliances, large furniture, or mattresses – just bed frames, a few bookcases, tables (the kind that can be knocked down), a recliner and rocker that had sentimental attachments, and many, many boxes of books, personal stuff, clothing, bedding.
*It may have been space. If I remember right, Allied came to the house after we had everything boxed up and sorted, so maybe they measured. The stuff was delivered to a relative’s garage, and it almost filled the garage, but it wasn’t stacked too high.
So yeah, it’s expensive.
I love moving, maybe because I don’t have to do any of the heavy work. It’s a great opportunity to sort, if you have time, and arranging stuff in a new place is kinda fun.
I moved a year and a half ago, and now I’m getting ready to move again. Fortunately, the bulk of my library never got unpcked from the last move. Unfortunately, I’ve gotten more DVDs and books that will have to be packed, and I’d bought furniture after I moved here. Since I knew I was going to be moving, though, I kept all the boxes that were still salvageable after the first move. And at least this time I’ll only be moving partway across town instead of 800 miles.
I totally sympathize. Not only is moving exhausting and tedious at the same time, but I’m very adverse to change and the change of a new place makes me depressed for a few weeks. And there’s unpacking and stuff to do, which is not good when you’re depressed, because then you get the guilt that goes with not doing things you should be doing, along with the mild depression and change disorder.
I am in the middle of packing up my house to move 10 miles. We have been here for 5 years and holy crap we have accumulated a lot of stuff. We’re gonna need a big truck for all the furniture.
We aren’t moving until the weekend of May 10, but I am starting a new job in a week, so I am trying to pack as much as can. So I have been evaluating every thing…“am I going to need this in the next 3 weeks?” “Should this go to the garage sale box?” “I thought I threw this out two years ago!”
And the books. I never realized how many we had until I started packing them up.
I hate moving, but in the end it is usually to a better residence (except when I moved from my parents house to an apartment in a not so great part of town by the university, that was a step down)
Good luck on your move and enjoy your new, more spacious house.
