Time vs. Money, and Our “Budget Lockdown" Challenge

Boy, do I love budgets!

Since getting married, Chris & I have set aside an hour or two at the end of every month to go over our budgets and spending.  We have a really boring name for this, our Monthly Budget Reconciliation Meetings, and it's like Chris's worst nightmare.  As someone who's back-burner-dreamed of becoming an accountant/book-keeper, these meetings are about 5,000 times more exciting for me than for poor Chris!  Still, since all the time we've known each other (2007), there's only been 8 months that we've overlapped and BOTH had full-time paid employment, so this balancing act of supporting each other has become pretty much routine for us.

Get serious here!

In leaving the DC area, one of the motivating factors was that we hoped to live in a lower cost-of-living area where we could both have some time to pursue unpaid activities while simultaneously not going into debt.  To do this, we've instituted the dreaded Budget Lockdown!

The Budget Lockdown logic goes, we have set categories of required expenses each month and we set our categorical limits so that our minimal income covers these expenses.  Then anything that we spend outside of these preset categories comes directly out of our savings, which should motivate us to stop unbudgeted spending, excepting emergencies.  [Side note: Mint.com is an awesome free tool for managing all this -- Mint automatically syncs expenses/income from an unlimited # of accounts so you just have to categorize, don't have to do any data entry!]

Sometime back in college while working on a living wage campaign, the idea that my life is worth at least $10/hour made me think about purchases in a way that has stuck with me: is this item going to be worth exchanging x hours of my life for?

When I was getting paid my max wage of $17/hour, it was a lot easier to say “OK, I can pretty easily buy this $10 item because it only took me half an hour to earn it, that's like no time at all!"  But those small items really add up and you end up with a bunch of STUFF that you don't necessarily need or feel great about owning.  However, later down the road when you can't justify spending really any money on discretionary items like this, at least you can reuse/reinvent all the stuff you already own in order to get by!

Q:  So what happens to this equation when your wage is $0/hour?

A:  You do a whole lot more things yourself!

Coming from someone who's always tried to live from a DIY standpoint, this earning $0/hour is sort of like an adventure in challenging myself to live true to my ideals.  No alcohol budget?  Homebrew!  No entertainment budget?  Go on a walk!  Or, get movies at the library, or convert your old home movies from when you were a kid, plus then you can finally get rid of that VCR!  No restaurants budget?  Plan menus better!  No snacks budget?  Make your own!  No fast food budget?  Make food ahead & freeze it!  No clothing budget?  Mend what you got!  Limited grocery budget?  Grow your own food!  And in winter?  Build a hoophouse or eat foodstuffs you've preserved!

Root Juice!

All of these pieces of advice are things I found totally impractical to do on the scale that could actually make an economic impact for our family while also holding a full-time job, and Chris was less interested in being the one to head up any of these projects (although he's a fantastic sous chef!).  I know very few people who are able to both work full-time AND do everything at home, and once you have kids you're trying to support, priorities all change because really spending your free time playing with your kid vs darning socks is no real contest.

Chillaxin'!

So what Chris & I are doing right now is sort of like a bucket-list fantasy of mine -- something that may end up a total disaster, but that I would always regret if I died without having tried, & something that only seems possible if we get in the DIY habit before we have children: Try to live with as little an economic impact as possible.  We're not really doing this anywhere close to the scale of self-sufficiency that some people do -- we're on the electrical grid & can't currently afford solar panels.  Obamacare kicked in just in time for us, which is miraculously saving us almost $700/month from what we paid before in health insurance, & basically makes this all possible!  We buy gas for Chris to get to his job 2 days a week, and to visit family & friends, near & far.  We have some internet, and drive to the library for more when we run out or need to transfer large files.  We had a chest freezer-full of very random, mostly expired foods when we moved here, plus a fair number of root veggies from our DC garden, so we have been creatively trying to use up whatever we already have on hand rather than using a grocery store as our primary source of ingredients.  But for day-to-day decisions, we are getting good at trying to figure out if there's a way to meet our needs without spending any money.

So after 3 months of Budget Lockdown, how's it going?  

Visiting the lake

As it turns out, we're fairly good about sticking to our spending for budgeted expenses, but a bit worse about spending when it comes to unbudgeted items.

Budget Lockdown means each unbudgeted purchase becomes more than just a snap decision -- something like buying a $20-40 item becomes an evening project to pore over all the reviews of different models to be certain to make the best selection.  For example, some of our recent unbudgeted expenses include: a Brush Grubber, a carbon monoxide detector, and a woodstove thermometer.  Pretty practical stuff that will improve our lives, but stuff that we didn't know we really “needed".

I'm usually fairly impatient and if I think I need a certain product in order to accomplish a task, I'd way rather just choose one that looks decent enough and hope for the best.  In the past, our Time vs Money graph settled on my side of the fence, where it actually realistically (financially) wouldn't be worth putting that much thought/effort/time into trying to save $20, but now since most of our time isn't paid anyway, Chris is in product-ordering-heaven being able to really deliberate over each item and not having any pushback from me about what a waste of time that could be.

Cheap date

The main positive thing that Budget Lockdown has done for us is it feels like there is no such thing as wasted time anymore!  By driving a wedge between these two aspects so intertwined in the “time is money" attitude, we're now able to do a lot of the random things we have “never had time for," or at least certainly never made time for.  There's no-one but ourselves to judge what a “good use of time" is!

Another aspect of how Budget Lockdown is playing out positively is in how it's affected some of our old patterns (ruts) we got into addressing ADHD in our relationship -- particularly as it pertains to the amount of time it takes to accomplish any concrete objectives.  Before learning anything about ADHD (and sometimes even after!), the typical pattern is something like:

1. Both partners agree on some course of action to reach a mutually desired outcome & decide how soon they want to accomplish it.
2. The non-ADHD partner spends considerable time & effort breaking the ultimate goal into smaller achievable pieces, setting deadlines and a logical order in which these should be done in order to meet the overall goal in the agreed-upon timetable.
3. These smaller benchmarks/subtasks are divided up, usually with more of the “harder" or less concrete tasks taken on by the non-ADHD partner (at least, if they've learned anything about working together).
4. The non-ADHD partner focuses and achieves all assigned tasks by stated deadlines, maybe even sooner because they probably knew to build a buffer into the timeline.
5. When they check in with each other, the ADHD partner has either lost track of the tasks, hyperfocused on one minute aspect of a task, or has forgotten why they are doing any of this stuff in the first place.
6. The non-ADHD partner gently (at first) reminds the ADHD partner of the ultimate goal they had both committed to, and points out how close they are, maybe even offers to take on more of the remaining incomplete subtasks if needed.
7. ADHD partner decides they no longer need to pursue the original goal, wants to change the “totally arbitrary" order of the subtasks, or wasn't listening while the non-ADHD partner was talking so asks again why they're doing any of this stuff.
8. Non-ADHD partner gets upset and starts blaming the ADHD partner for not paying attention and not caring about their shared life together & melodramatically ranting about how they will never get anything done as a team because “nothing ever gets done if I don't just do it myself!" and “what's the point of being in a relationship if I can't count on you to do your half?"
9. ADHD partner gets defensive and blames non-ADHD partner for being so focused on deadlines and checking things off that they never get to have any fun & why are they so single-minded/controlling/nagging/boring/etc, what is their problem anyway?!?
10. Neither partner feels especially heard, understood, or loved, and therefore neither feels like compromising or working together any more, and so the shared goal remains unachieved, and the time the non-ADHD partner put into getting them 80% of the way there is just lost & unrecognized.  The ADHD partner promptly forgets this episode ever happened but the non-ADHD partner begins to hold a grudge after this scenario repeats several times over.

Hours of amusement

So now, with Budget Lockdown (aka when there's no perception of time a-wasting), I can largely let go of tasks, goals, & deadlines and it is much easier to adopt Chris's concept of time where the days blend into each other and what doesn't get done today might possibly get done next week or maybe next month, without resenting the time slipping by.  Instead of thinking like a single-minded linear robot, “It is now 2:34pm on Tuesday January 7th, we only have however many hours left to accomplish this huge list of stuff today," I can now think simply “It's Winter."

For me, someone who as a kid always dreamed of living in a tree with wolves and squirrels as my only companions and only the sun & passing seasons to tell time by, this is a lot closer to living by my actual values, not what I've been socialized to want to accomplish.  This new attitude toward time & living with a lack of to-do lists has led much more often to the sort of interactions I always hoped to have with my partner:

1. Hey baby, how's that project coming along?
2. Well, I was working on that thing we talked about doing, but then I was cold so I went out to get some wood for the fire, and when I was outside I went to go check the mail, and a friend sent us this CD, and I saw a bird fly by that dropped this feather, isn't it big?  Whoa, I love this song!  Wanna dance?



Why not?!

3. Definitely!

So far at least, our Budget Lockdown experiment is going pretty darn well!  We don't expect to be able to make it last more than a few months before we get jobs or decide to have children, but meanwhile we'll be doing our best to make the most of every day, in our own way!

Road Trip Snacks Part 3: Banana Chips

Chris & I have practically a freezer full of once-mushy brown bananas.  We do a lot better nowadays than we once did, but still sometimes a few ripe bananas slip past the lovely yellow & delicious stage into the more-brown-than-yellow stage of ripeness.  At that point, Chris tends to ignore them and I eventually throw them into the freezer.

Side note: if you freeze the bananas whole with skin-on, then when you're ready to use them, just pop them in a bowl of hot water for about 30 seconds, and the skin will slip off easily!  Then you can either use the rest of the frozen banana immediately in an ice-cold smoothie, or continue defrosting it for baking.

Anyway, I've promised Chris that I wouldn't be adding any more unfortunate brown bananas to our frozen stash, so I had to come up with another overripe banana solution.  This particular night, our oven was already in use roasting our peanuts, so baking anything was pretty much ruled out.  How about homemade banana chips?!

I had made banana chips one time before using a recipe I found online, and they took FOREVER.  It was a delicious concoction involving a honey-cardamom glaze or something like that, but news flash -- when you add a glaze to food that you're going to dehydrate, it makes it take about 400 times longer!

So I just went super simple on these banana chips.

You'll need:

• Bananas
• Nutmeg or cinnamon, if desired
• Knife or mandoline
• A food dehydrator 

Step 1: Slice the bananas

Try to achieve even thin slices, about 1/8" thick.  The thicker the slices, the longer they'll take in the dehydrator.  I just used a knife, but a mandoline would be excellent if you're a perfectionist.

Step 2: Arrange slices on the racks

Spread your banana slices in a single layer on the racks of the food dehydrator, making sure they don't overlap.  Our 4 bananas took up almost 2 racks.  They do shrink as they cook.

Step 3: Add seasonings, if desired

Your banana chips are going to be sweet, so you don't need to add any sugar!  We added nutmeg to half of the bananas and left the other half plain.

Step 4: Dehydrate and Wait

Set your dehydrator to 135ºF and run it until the chips are crisp and completely dry.  They'll look a bit shriveled but shouldn't be chewy.  Cooking time will depend on your dehydrator's settings, but it should take between 4-8 hours.

Check the chips periodically by munching on one -- if it's crunchy, you're done -- if not, just put the lid back on and check again in about an hour.

We made both kale and banana chips at the same time and they didn't absorb each others' flavors at all so you can definitely combine multiple dehydration projects at one time!

Step 5: Yum!

Once they're done, turn off the dehydrator and let the chips cool completely before packing them.  These banana chips will keep in an air tight container for up to a week, but we planned to eat them pretty much immediately!

If you care about discoloration of the bananas (like if you're saving them for longer storage), I've read you can soak the banana slices in citric acid or lemon juice back at the beginning, but again this will add to the amount of time needed for fully dehydrating.

Chris preferred the plain banana chips & I preferred the ones with the light dusting of nutmeg.  They were a perfect sweet snack for keeping us awake on a few late nights of driving!

Road Trip Snacks Part 2: Kale Chips

Chris & I planted a row of curly kale back in August that we knew we probably wouldn't get to harvest much of before moving.  We cut a couple of large bunches by the end of November and it looked nice and hearty for the next community gardener coming into our old garden plot.  Bea thought she had finished using up all our kale but found some leftovers during project clean-out-the-fridge.  It still looked pretty good, so we made a batch of kale chips for our roadtrip!  This recipe was adapted from the Kitchn's “Snack Recipe: Cheesy Yet Vegan Kale Chips".

You'll need:

• 3/4 cup cashews
• 1 bunch kale, with stems removed
• 2 cloves garlic, peeled
• 1 tablespoon Bragg's Liquid Aminos
• 2 tablespoons olive oil
• 1/3 cup nutritional yeast
• 2 tablespoons of lemon juice
• A food dehydrator (preferred method)
• A small food processor

Step 1: Soak the cashews

Cover the cashews with water and let them soak for at least an hour.

Step 2: Chop the kale

While cashews are soaking, remove the stems from the kale, and chop the leaves into bite-sized pieces.  The kale will shrink as it dehydrates so cut it a bit bigger than you want the final chips to be.

Step 3: Make the sauce

Add the garlic, Braggs, oil, and nutritional yeast to a food processor.  Give it a few quick spins, enough to chop the garlic and combine the ingredients into a sauce.  After an hour of soaking, drain the cashews and add them to the food processor.  Run the processor until the cashews are ground into a slightly liquid paste and thoroughly combined with the rest of the sauce.  Add more lemon juice a teaspoon at a time if you need to thin it out -- it should be like a thick salad dressing.

Step 4: Combine

In a large bowl, combine kale and cashew sauce, making sure the kale is evenly coated.  (If you're impatient, this makes a great raw salad if you want to eat it right now!)

Step 5: Dehydrate

Place kale pieces on the racks of your food dehydrator, allowing a little space between pieces so they don't overlap.  Use multiple racks if needed -- ours took up 4 racks.  Set the dehydrator for 135ºF and run it until the chips are crisp and completely dry -- cooking time will depend on your dehydrator's settings, but it should take between 2-4 hours.

If you don't have a food dehydrator, you can set your oven for the lowest setting (like WARM not bake).  Depending on your oven, you may possibly even need to prop the door open to keep the heat as low as possible.  The goal is really to keep these chips as “raw" as possible by NOT cooking them, so you need the heat below 150ºF for sure and lower if you can get it to work in a conventional oven.  The cooking time will vary based on the temperature you can achieve, but check very regularly so they don't turn into ash!

When using a dehydrator, the risk of overcooking is diminished so you just need to check on the chips periodically -- taste one for done-ness about every hour or so.  When they're light and crunchy, they're ready to eat!

These kale chips will keep in an air tight container for up to a week, but if 2 people have the container sitting between them, the chips will disappear very quickly!

Road Trip Snacks Part 1: Roasted Peanuts

If there's one form of vacation we Fixettwells take over and over, it's the “visit as much of the 2/3rds of the eastern USA as possible in one week-long road trip" variety.  So for Christmas 2013, we bought a cheap used cargo van and set off on an adVANture!

Being budget-conscious, Bea spent the week before we left town planning our menu around eating up all the perishables in our fridge.  When we weren't quite able to finish everything, she decided to spend the night before we left in the kitchen, whipping up roadworthy snacks!  These all turned out to be delicious, but we definitely recommend starting this snack-making project before 10pm and finishing before 4:30am of the day you're supposed to leave!

This post is in 3 parts:
     Roasted Peanuts (keep reading)
     Kale Chips
     Banana Chips

Roasted Peanuts!

We grew peanuts in one bed of our garden this year -- we had pretty poor germination rates and so our resulting peanut harvest was pretty pathetically small.  Peanuts are legumes and so they help add nitrogen to your soil, but they have a pretty long growing season (100-130 frost-free days, depending on the variety) so you have to be willing to devote them the growing space for basically the entire season.  In Washington, DC where we grew ours, you plant them a few weeks after the last frost (we put ours in around Memorial Day) and then you dig them up when the plants turn yellow in the fall -- before the first frost.

Each plant produces a cluster of peanuts but unless you devote a whole lot of space to peanut production, this is going to be a novelty crop for home or community gardeners.  For instance, it takes over 500 peanuts to produce a 12-ounce jar of peanut butter!  So to us, roasting them whole makes more sense.

Unfortunately, we dug up our peanuts right before making our Month-Long Move so stowed them in a bag in the fridge “to deal with later".  This is definitely not recommended as Best Practices for Roasted Peanuts!  Turns out it's better to hang the entire plant to dry for about a month.  However, even with our limited harvest & rocky harvesting procedure, the resulting snack is pretty tasty, and next year we vow to do even better!

We found some basic instructions on roasting peanuts on WikiHow -- and modified slightly since we had garden-fresh raw peanuts.

Step 1: Clean the peanuts

Our peanuts still had mud and dirt on them, plus the runner stems and unfortunately also a little mold.  Wash everything in cold water and compost anything that's severely discolored, mushy, or moldy.



We made 3 piles: compost, shellable, and unshelled.  The shellable were ones with minor discoloration that still felt firm and edible but wouldn't be pretty as-is -- but just remove the shells and voila, they look much more presentable!  For our unshelled peanuts we chose just those that had survived their being ignored for too long & still looked good after a thorough washing.

Step 2: Dry the peanuts

Spread them out and pat them dry with a towel.

Step 3: Preheat the oven

Set it for 350ºF

Step 4: Put peanuts on a baking sheet

Make sure they fit on only one layer -- they don't shrink as they roast so use multiple baking sheets if needed.  Also if you're doing some shelled and some unshelled, use multiple sheets since the cooking time differs.  If you're worried about discoloring your cookie sheets, use parchment paper or tin foil under the peanuts.

Step 5: Place in the center of the oven

Step 6: Check and turn the nuts occasionally

We used a spatula to move the peanuts around to make sure they got roasted on all sides.  This step seemed more important for the shelled peanuts.  To check the unshelled nuts for done-ness, we opened and ate one at a time every 5 minutes or so.  The cooking time indicated on our recipe was 15-20 minutes for unshelled and 20-25 minutes for shelled peanuts -- however, we found that it actually took more than half an hour until our peanuts were roasty and tasty, but your mileage may vary.  When our kitchen started smelling like roasted peanuts, that was when they actually tasted done to us so you could use this as an indicator.

Step 7: Remove from the oven & cool

We made sure to cool the peanuts completely before pouring them into jars so that we didn't have to deal with moisture buildup or potential mold.  Double check to make sure that they're completely cool before putting the lids on the jars!

Step 8: Salt if desired

Our peanuts tasted pretty good unsalted so we left them plain, but you could add salt if you want.  Some recipes call for soaking the unshelled peanuts for multiple hours before roasting, but we didn't have time for all that since we did this so late at night.  They turned out yummy anyway!

Enjoy!

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!