Moving is so hard.
My wife and I recently got the wild idea that we needed to find a bigger and better place. Our current house was really quite nice, but it had some limitations. Although the house was quite spacious, it wasn't well allocated. For example, all four of kids were sharing one bathroom. That's a very bad thing when you have three girls and one very longsuffering boy. The sheer space consumed by girly "products" staggers the male mind.
Another problem is that our two youngest daughters are sharing a bedroom. They like it now. But they'll want their privacy as they get older. We also had our master bedroom on the sale floor as the children, which is less than ideal when you want some privacy or less noise when the kids are playing.
So figuring out the particular characteristics of the new house is the easy part. In our case, we were also lucky enough to find a new place with all of the right attributes and sell our old place in record time. Then came the hard part - the really hard part - packing and moving.
Now, I have to proper credit where it's due. My wife of sixteen years, Kelly, did ALL of the really hard work with packing up the old place. Our buyers put a tight timeline on us. So Kelly spent many a day working into the wee hours of the night packing up box after box of our belongings. (You rule, Kell!) I, on the other hand, was pretty useless due to my heavy travel schedule with PASS and business trips. I did manage to help get several rooms packed up, but in pales in comparison to the work Kelly did.
We also greatly sped up the move by renting a POD, a Portable On-Demand Storage unit. If you're moving and you've never heard of a POD, you should check out http://www.pods.com. These things are awesome! Ugly, true. But awesome. One of the most time consuming aspects of moving is carrying the boxes back and forth from the room you're packing to the moving truck. Since we had the POD sitting in our driveway, we were able to pack up each room and then move the boxes at our leasure. In addition, the POD also sits at your new house and can be unpacked when the time is right.
The big day finally arrived and the movers came. The movers also deserve some credit because they essentially did two days work in one very long day (well, 1 1/2 days).
So we're sitting in a house full to the brim with boxes and are slowly working our way through them. But unpacking, in its own way, is harder than packing. At least with packing, you're moving stuff from a known, well-defined location (say, the kitchen cabinet) to a box. But when you're unpacking, you've moving your stuff to an unknown location. You don't know if that stuff in the box really goes best in place X in the new kitchen or anyone of the 8 other places that'd work.
I unpack with this idea in mind - let's get everything out of the boxes and then worry about the final location later. Does this make my wife and kids happy? Uhm... Not really, because it's so hard to find things in the kitchen. But hey, we went from two dozen boxes to a kitchen full of stuff. Maybe I need to get one of those label makers so that the kids can tell where the bread and bagels are compared to the snacks and chips?
With that said, I have mountains of boxes to go through before I sleep. In fact, I may not be blogging much for a week or two due to the enormous amount of work that awaits.
Anyone else have some moving advice or a moving horror story? I'd love to hear your tips and tales!
Best regards,
-Kevin
