Our Month-Long Move

Well, we haven’t written anything since our initial post & now that we actually both live in one place, it seems like a good time to make another update!

Back in September seems like forever ago because it has been a totally crazy month for us, basically self-inflicted, but still crazy nonetheless.  Anyway, back in September when we made our initial plan, we decided Columbus Day weekend would be a good time to move because more than likely Chris would’ve found a job in Charlottesville by then, and also more than likely Bea’s coworkers would’ve had ample time to advertise her position & identify her replacement.  We reserved a moving truck and Bea started packing.

The plan was Chris would move first because he would be starting a new job while Bea would stay behind to wrap up her job, overlap and train the incoming employee, and clean the old house.  Sounds pretty simple, right?  Well, here’s how it worked for us!

Moving Mishap #1

A week or two before we officially started moving, we went on a bit of a Craigslist shopping spree – excited to have more space in the new house, & to prove to ourselves just how grown-up we are now, we bought an enormous beanbag and a papasan chair like everyone had back in college.  Most people hold off on buying furniture until after the move, but we thought we’d better do it up quick while we still had neighbors to buy stuff from.  On the way back from one of these treks in Truckaroni (our fairly faithful pickup truck), we smelled brake fluid and Chris’ handy-dandy pocket thermometer showed that one of our wheels was 50 degrees hotter than the rest – definitely a bad sign.  Stuck brake calipers – the mechanic said if we drove it down to the new place and back before fixing it, it’d cost double to repair.  So we loaded Chris’ hatchback practically to the brim with a futon mattress and little else & made the 1^st move sans Truckaroni and without most of the stuff we hoped to bring to set up “the basics”.

Moving Mishap #2

This past May, Chris decided to tackle the ground ivy infesting his precious strawberry patch, and in trying to eradicate his enemy, he totally lost all track of time.  These 6 hours weeding hunched over led Chris to spend months in physical therapy, dealing with terrible back pain that flares up without any seeming pattern or obvious stressor.  Of course the week before our big move, this pain flared up to the point that Chris could hardly walk or even stand up straight.  We put out an emergency call to our friends, and they really came through for us to help us out with Stage 1 of the move.

Moving Mishap #3

Columbus Day weekend came and Chris’ back seemed to be on the mend.  We got in the car to go pick up the moving truck, and almost immediately it began raining.  We had reserved this truck for 3 days, and needed the first 2 days to pack everything and the 3^rd to unload.  Every time the rain let up a bit we would throw a towel over some box and run it out to the truck.  This worked great for about 12 hours, and then right when we were about to call it quits for the day, Bea slipped on the truck’s slippery-when-wet ramp and her ankle turned under her.  Bea usually thinks the worst, so assuming she was going to have to amputate her entire foot, she sat in an office chair and didn’t get out for the rest of the night, rolling around wherever she needed to go, not wanting to put unnecessary pressure on her sprained ankle.  She heroically limped through the rest of the move, joining Chris in the ranks of “Expert Pillow Carriers”.  (A week later Bea’s ankle was mostly fine.)

Moving Mishap #4

We made it to the new place about midnight!  Friends & family saved our butts showing up the next morning to help us to unload everything we owned.

Or, at the time we thought it was everything we owned.  The next weekend Chris bought a riding tractor with a 42” mowing deck that virtually filled up the pickup truck.

Then we looked up in our attic, which was full of Bea’s childhood stuff she got from her folks last year as they prepared to sell their house.  Then we realized we had that entire paint & caulk collection in our basement.  Then we saw our backyard.  And our shed.  And our bike shed.  DANG!!!

It’s a long story, but among our gardening supplies, we own (20) 55-gallon-barrels.  There’s a lot about moving where you say “how much does this cost to move vs. how much would it cost to replace?”  The trick is it’s not only how much it costs to replace but also to dispose of the original item.  For Bea, this equation is totally in favor of keeping items already owned because of the amount of effort  it took to get them the first time, the story behind the items, who gave them to us or helped us find them, and then the consequences of discarding/disposing of the unwanted items.  Working at a reuse center for the past 6 years has shown her a lot of which used items actually hold their value and are desirable to other people vs. which used items are just considered straight up garbage by the general public.  Most of what Bea doesn’t want anymore is because it’s too busted or useless to be something anyone else wants either.  Sure, there’s that off-chance that you might be able to find someone to turn your old floppy disk collection into art (ahem, Chris did this successfully!) but how many times do you have to put in the energy to list the free item, receive no responses, relist, and meanwhile keep track of where the item is while packing everything you own, not to mention then having to find a place to acquire this same item on the other end of the trip?!  TOO MUCH WORK.  Bea errs on the side of hauling around every last thing she’s ever laid a finger on because it will be useful someday, while Chris errs on the side of abandoning items & pretending they just don’t exist anymore, leaving them for whoever comes after him to deal with.

So fast-forward through a lot of tension around this mega-disagreement, and then here we are now the 2^nd weekend in November.  We have a 2^nd moving truck.  This is a Uhaul instead of a Penske truck and we find out as soon as we get the truck parked in the driveway that the length of the truck isn’t listed accurately.  The “Mom’s Attic” space above the cab that Uhaul advertises as giving you extra space as compared to other moving trucks is in fact a total rip-off.  When Penske said “26’ truck,” the interior dimension was 26’.  When Uhaul said “17’ truck,” they were referring to the exterior roof dimension – including the “Mom’s Attic”! – meaning only the top 2 feet of the truck is actually anywhere close to 17’, and so you end up with about 90 cubic feet fewer than you expected.  That’s a huge difference!!!

This is an issue for us because this 2^nd moving truck we are actually sharing with someone who has a court order to be able to enter her ex’s house ONE TIME ONLY in order to claim her & her children’s items.  We’ve agreed to store the stuff safely until some later time when she can claim them, and the ex’s house is between our old place & our new place, hence we’re sharing a truck.  Add to the confusion that she left a full year ago and doesn’t know how much stuff will actually still be there to claim.  So we loaded “our half” of the truck past our share, up to about 3/4ths full – and still had a few things that didn’t fit in (thanks to that stupid “Mom’s Attic” bs).  We showed our truckmate how much space was left for her stuff and she looked nervous about it fitting in the last 1/4 of the truck but thought it might work.  We felt desperate and torn, but didn’t want anything to go poorly since she only had the one chance to enter the house & get her stuff back, so we made a snap decision that we would figure out the logistics of getting a 3^rd moving truck & unloaded part of our stuff so there’d be plenty of space for our truckmate.  The rest of this truckload went surprisingly smoothly given the circumstances!

Moving Mishap #5

So by now, 2^nd week of November, Bea was supposed to have finished her job, but since no candidate had been identified that she could train, she felt compelled to write a training document explaining her job.  This morphed into a week-long project creating a 30-page manual explaining all the processes & procedures & templates she’d spent a couple of years creating that she didn’t want to disappear while the position was vacant.  Chris kept saying “LET IT GO, you don’t work there anymore!”  Bea didn’t like that & persisted in finishing this mammoth document no matter how much time it took.  Of course that meant that Bea didn’t have the week off like she had planned, and our house didn’t get cleaned like she had planned to do before Chris came back north for the final move.

We got our 3^rd and (hopefully!) final moving truck Thursday November 14^th – despite disliking Uhaul, we were offered a “great deal” on their website for returning the truck to a different location.  Since we thought we were going to visit Chris’ parents in Richmond that Friday night, we figured we would save money and not have to go out of our way.  WELL.  Since the old house wasn’t clean before we loaded the truck, we ended up cleaning & loading somewhat simultaneously for all day Friday and in fact until 1am Saturday, when the original plan had been to unload the truck on Friday morning.  Plus it started raining again so there was a constant flow of Bea tracking mud and leaves into the house as quickly as Chris could clean them out of the house.  We called Uhaul several times to ask for an extension and got different answers from different representatives.  We left the house “broom clean” (just barely), although ran out of time to mop.  We should mention that we have friends moving into the space so our thorough cleaning rampage was as much for their benefit as our personal integrity to leave a place better than you find it.

We arrived at the new house at 4:30am, completely exhausted.  Chris summoned up some mega-strength to unload the frozen & refrigerated goods while Bea collapsed asleep, too tired to move.  But by 7am we were up and unloading that darn truck.  We threw everything on the front porch & in the yard to make it as quick as possible.  By 9:30 we were getting “where are you?” calls from Uhaul.  By 10:30 we were hauling that Uhaul down toward Richmond but got it there 60 minutes late and got charged for an extra day.  We had planned to pay for that extra day anyway, but wanted to actually have a full extra day with the truck and get closer to a full night’s sleep than the 2 hours we got.  Stuporous and too tired to argue with the Uhaul guy, we gave up and went to breakfast at 1pm, then drove back to the bus station on the other side of Charlottesville to retrieve Chris’ car, and then back home to fall straight to sleep.  All in all it was 150 extra miles of driving in a pickup truck that gets 15 mpg and definitely not worth the discount.

So to summarize, here are some helpful tips when moving.  Live & learn!

• Sort your stuff with plenty of time before you pack it so that you can get rid of it if you don’t need it, or identify suitable replacement options ahead of time so you don’t have to make snap decisions about how badly you “need” something.
• Try to get on the same page as your partner about what you intend to get rid of before one person is trying to lift something into the truck and the other person goes on strike saying, “I’ve always hated this chair.”
• Don’t buy a bunch of stuff right before you move.  Especially really bulky furniture.
• Get 1 moving truck, not 3.
• Rent from Penske, not Uhaul.  Not only are their trucks the size that they say they are, but Penske also gives you unlimited miles & encourages you to see the scenery along the way.  That’d be nice.
• Make sure at least one of you enjoys (and excels) at Tetris.  Delegate this person to be captain of loading the truck.
• It won’t be easier spreading the move out into multiple trips.  Just get ‘er done!