5Ws Wednesday
I could easily write a very lengthy response to this question. My answer would be something about when I quit my long-time career two years ago without having a backup plan. In fact, I’ve spent the past two years writing about that moment. So wihout rehashing that moment of emotional strength, let me elaborate on a moment of physical strength. This moment is also the reason I say the same thing to everyone who tells me they’re moving. I tell them: Don’t wait until the last minute to pack! I also tell them to hire movers if they can afford it. And here’s why…
When Josh and I moved into our house we were coming from a 3-bedroom apartment where we had gobs of stuff. Four years ago when we moved, Josh was still very much into his hobby of cocktail making. Our dining room was outlined with shelves of bottles:
Our hallway was lined with bookshelves packed full of books. There were more bottles along the top of the shelves:
The second bedroom was my office/craft room. Full of yarn and scrapbooking materials and more books. The third bedroom was a hodge podge of more bottles, what I nicknamed the “reject liquor” because it was cheap stuff that didn’t have a place of honor among the fancy bourbons in the dining room. This apartment also had a storage shed/outdoor closet on the patio. I’m telling you, we like stuff. And we get into a hobby, we go hard.
We’re also procastinators. Imagine if you will, how much time it must take to pack up all those bottles. They have to be wrapped in bubble wrap too. Also imagine the books. You can’t use big boxes for the books because they’ll be too heavy to carry. In fact I wrote a whole post about my beef with that one scene in the movie “Julie & Julia” where she casually and effortlessly tosses a big box of cookbooks into the back of her jeep when they’re moving. Not accurate of an authentic box of cookbooks. Josh has a large collection of those too, so I know.
So imagine how much time that takes. We had a deadline for being out of our apartment. It was 8:00 a.m. on a Saturday morning that we had to put our keys in the drop box at the office. We also had a U-haul for exactly one day/night. Despite our best efforts, we couldn’t reserve the U-haul for a second day because someone else had reserved it after us. Leading up to this final day in our apartment, we had made trip after trip to our house with as much stuff as our car could carry. It wasn’t enough to make much of a dent in what we had to move.
Now imagine the last day in our apartment. We got up around 7 or 8:00 that Friday morning. Got the U-haul and then spent that entire day packing what was left and making trips to the house to unload things and then come back. Keep in mind, we also had to clean the apartment so we didn’t get charged for anything we didn’t clean. Getting that deposit back was important. We spent that entire day and that entire night making trips to the house. Yes, I said all night.
It took all of our strength to keep unloading that U-haul in the middle of the night and the wee hours of the morning. I particularly remember the struggle of loading and unloading our washer and dryer at 4 in the morning. We were exhausted to say the least. But, we had no choice. We had to be out by 8 a.m. and I think the U-haul had to be back by 7.
We went room by room clearing it out and loading it up. Josh vaccumed and did a quick clean of each room and then shut the door when it was done. I believe we pulled up to the house with our last load around 5 a.m. The sun hadn’t come up yet. I had Rocky, our deaf bulldog, in the car with me. Josh took him for a little walk. Then we set his crate up in the kitchen, threw a blanket on our bare mattress in the bedroom, and we all crashed. For only about an hour and a half. After 24 straight hours of moving, we were back up at 6:30ish. We desperately needed food, so we went to Ihop and got breakfast. Then we took the Uhaul back, dropped the key off at the apartment office, and went back to our new home. New to us as a couple, but not new to Josh since it’s the house he grew up in.
We survived the experience. It took every last ounce of strength we had to finish by the deadline. I remember the first shower I took after that night was almost a religious experience it was so good. Fun fact: there are still boxes of bottles and other cocktail glasses that we haven’t unpacked from 4 years ago. There’s also one box of misc. things in our back room that we haven’t unpacked. We’ll get to it all one day. We’re not moving again…ever. So we’ve got all the time in the world to unpack.
Want to help me accomplish my dream of being a paid writer? Buy me a coffee!
Leave a Reply