By Brian Bloom
Regional Manager
“It will fit,” my better half implored me. “A little higher… to the left, now back a little. There,” she said, a smug smile upon her face. “I told you it would fit.”
“Uh honey?” I interrupted. “How do I get out?”
Yep… moving day.
Behind surgery, a new home purchase, the birth of your child and the death of a loved one, it is considered the most stressful day of your life. I’ve now done it 26 times, the 27th coming up in another 30 days. It explains the gray hairs.
My wife claims I’m attempting to do the 50-state tour. Newspaper jobs have taken me from Iowa to Montana, Nebraska, Georgia, Massachusetts, Colorado, Mississippi, Arkansas and Tennessee. Within those states were multiple other moves, often from temporary living quarters to a home or occasionally from one community to the next.
I’m a veteran of packing. I can fill every inch of any truck or van. I know you can put pictures under sofa cushions, that car trailers are a pain to back up and that no matter how careful you are in packing, the one item you don’t want broke will break.
Somewhere in my many moves entire sets of wine glasses have disappeared, lamp shades have arrived without lamps and the number of shoes my wife owns multiply.
I’ve learned the incredibly expensive lesson that you should turn off the water at the street main after moving out of your house and you should document every item professional movers pack just in case the one thing you can’t live without doesn’t make the trip.
Our latest move is a double header.
This past weekend I moved the bare necessities into a nice zero-lot home. Couch, chair bed, dresser and enough kitchen items to keep me from having to wash dishes daily.
At the end of February comes the big move. Furniture once bought for our 4,100 square foot five-bedroom home is expected to miraculously shrink to our now-2,100 square foot dimensions.
We have two sofas, four beds, four dressers and three dining room tables. We have three different sets of outdoor furniture for a home with virtually no outdoors. We have pool lounges with no pool, mowers with no grass, shovels, rakes, even picks and axes. The 12-foot green space will be landscaped to the hilt.
We have three cars for a two-car space, five Christmas trees for a home without five rooms, irrigation hose for a pond we can’t build and enough pictures to keep us from ever having to paint wall space. We have two storage units filled with stuff I no longer remember.
We have a kitchen base cabinet with sink included, three sets of stools – none of course to the height required for our new digs.
We have 31 sets of curtains for a home with eight windows, enough garden hose to water the subdivision and enough saws, pruners and knives to trim every tree limb in Shelby Farms Park.
And amidst the impending sore backs and frayed nerves; despite the bellyaching and whining that will certainly come when we make our last move, my wife and I will be together for the first time in eight months and it will all be worth it.
If you see me at the end of February and I casually ask what you are doing this weekend… run. Call me when you move however – I can lend you some boxes.
