Shattered

Tuesday is moving day. This has been a death march for nearly two months, since we first decided to move into town. Of course, we could have just packed everything (or hired someone to pack everything) and avoided all the stress and conflict, but that's not my way. So instead we jumped in--first in waders, then in scuba gear--through 15 years of history, squirreled away in small baskets, hidden in the attic or the back of the closet. Of course, as a guy, my preferred method of organising is to take everything out, sort it in little piles and then pack it. As you can imagine, this makes a hell of a mess, but it is effective.

We sold a lot of stuff on the local equivalent of eBay, which was further complicated because much of it belonged to the children, who didn't understand why they couldn't keep a shirt that was three sizes too small, or a toy they hadn't played with in 6 years. This meant a lot of subterfuge to keep things out of sight (and therefore out of mind) although occasionally we were caught out. One time we sold a small fridge and we had the kids when we went to deliver it. They demanded we keep it so they could put it in their dad's garage when he turned into a band room. (I should note, their dad has been making promises like that for 14 years and has never kept one, but God bless them for being so optimistic.)

Anyway, fast forward two months and we've sold a lot, thrown a lot away, filled a double garage with boxes (not including any furniture) and the house was still littered with piles of stuff! That wouldn't have been a problem--the plan was to move out before putting the house on the market--except that while we were looking for a place, we realised that photos of empty houses looked awful! So last week we met a realtor who absolutely agreed we should take photos before we removed the furniture, and scheduled a photographer for today.

My girlfriend's job was to clean the entire house, whereas my job was to sort out a single room. She finished in four hours; it took me five. To be fair, that was the room that had become the primary staging area, and you could not walk through it for all the stuff.

Of course, this was not packing, this was just clearing up for the photos, and while I was shovelling things in the garage, my girlfriend was throwing things back in the closets, cupboards and drawers that I'd already emptied! At the end of the day, I felt like we'd taken a giant step backwards.

Then after dinner we took another step backwards, as one of the kids is going to school camp tomorrow and not only had she not prepared, but she put out much of what she needed to be packed! As a result, we had to go through the garage and open several boxes to find everything.

Of course some of the boxes had to be shifted, and a couple ended up outside the garage. I should have put them back straight away, but I had a hundred other things to do and so I left them out for about an hour. Needless to say, after the driest January on record, with no rain at all in the last three weeks, it chose that hour to rain and the boxes were ruined. (Thankfully it was all camping gear and so was not affected by the rain. Can you imagine if it had been a box of family photos?!)

So Sunday and half of Monday are exclusively devoted to finishing packing, and Monday afternoon we'll get the keys to the house and move a carload of breakable items. Tuesday the movers arrive at 730am, and I hope they bring a very big truck! It's going to be full-on until we unpack and settle in on Wednesday, and then I can start job hunting again because I need something less stressful in my life. :-)