I (Don’t) Like to Move It Move It

Somewhere out there is a human who enjoys moving. I don’t mean enjoys having moved, that’s a different thing. Generally people are good with that. I mean a person who enjoys the process of moving, which might make that person an energy vampire. The cleaning, the packing, the boxes, the boxes, the boxes. At its best it’s a hassle, and at worst it’s a layer of hell Dante chose not to write about.

Naturally, I’ve moved twice in the past year and a half. The trip up here was, using the lingo, a national move. This involves an estimator who (in current times) FaceTimes in and looks at all your stuff, then tells you it weighs 5,238 pounds and will require 64 boxes. And they’ll be RIGHT. It’s quite a carnival trick. They’ll also offer a service where a day or two before your move, a bunch of people can come over and pack all your stuff for you. What an enticing offer. Quite the indulgence. We dismissed it since this was in the early days of the pandemic, when we thought having people touching your stuff made it radioactive. Anyway, if you get three estimates from three different companies, the cost to move all this will vary between “that doesn’t seem like enough” and “let’s just leave it all here and buy new stuff.” Like most other things in life, don’t pick the cheapest one and don’t pick the most expensive. We picked the one in the middle and it all worked out exactly as well as we could have hoped.

The beauty of a national move is that- wait for it- you’re moving far away. This means one thing: everything will either be on the truck or it won’t. Aside from the small amount of items (clothes, edibles, your children- whatever is important to you) that will go in the car or plane, its all gotta be on the truck or its gotta go. There’s no back-and-forth between your old place and your new place. The kitchen has to be empty, and that isn’t as easy to pull off as it sounds when your brain has been telling you your whole life to not waste food, and the local food pantry gives you nasty looks when you bring them a can of tomatoes that expired last week but is perfectly fine because expiration dates don’t mean the food is bad.

Aside from learning how to get rid of food without judgment, get involved with your community’s Buy Nothing (someone will take that package of six blank VHS tapes), figure out your library’s policy on book donations, locate your nearest Goodwill or thrift shop that will grudgingly accept whatever else. Then go get 64 boxes. You’ll want to buy fewer boxes than that, since boxes are expensive and there’s no way all my stuff requires 64 boxes, I can see that just by looking at all my stuff, it just can’t. Get all 64, dummy, and don’t forget the giant roll of bubble wrap and a packing tape gun. If you enjoy sanity, don’t cheap it on the packing tape gun. I’ve learned from experience that spending an extra $4 on this item is well worth it, as it will keep your loved ones from having to commit you lest you become a danger to yourself and others. Really, just $4.

Moving day comes along, you may or may not have had to get a $90 permit from the city to block off parking spots for the truck and also have an uncomfortable conversation with the next door neighbors you’ve never spoken to in seven years in order to get that permit, and then you wait. A bunch of dudes (always dudes) come along and Tetris all your shit into whichever portion of a semi is yours.

Speaking of, prior to my national move, it hadn’t occurred to me that our stuff would be traveling with someone else’s stuff, since we didn’t have a whole truck’s worth of stuff. In fact, our truck would be going on to Idaho after dropping off in Portland. We were fortunate to be the first stop, since adding stops adds days to the trip. When you first sign on with the moving company, they’ll tell you that your truck will arrive at your new house anywhere from 5 to 72 days from the time it leaves your old one. Once it gets closer to moving day they can tighten that window (say, 6 to 71 days), and once the driver is physically in your kitchen on moving day you should get a much clearer idea, since only the driver knows where he’s driving and when. At that point the window should be down to 48 hours or so.

Now, it’s time to go. Get in the car, whose available cargo space can now be measured in cubic centimeters, and hit the road. All things considered, this is the easiest part of the process.

We just made our second move since coming to Oregon, but this one took us all of one mile. Different story altogether. The options for a move like this tend to be:

Hire local movers who will come to your house one day and take all the stuff to the new house
Rent a truck and skip the movers, do the heavy lifting yourselves
Hire movers for one day, rent a truck for a different day, and spend roughly a month filling up your own car and going back and forth, dropping open boxes of random crap in your new house to “sort out later”

Obviously we chose option #3. Going into the move we figured that since we had done a Big Move a year prior, we could handle this Little Move standing on our heads. This was reasonably accurate, but of course there’s no such thing as an easy move, just easier moves.

So what have I learned through all of this? A handful of observations stick out:

THROW. IT. OUT.

Read the reviews for movers, but don’t get hung up on them. Yelpers often live in their own alternate fiction, full of grievance because movers had the audacity to suggest they should have actually packed their belongings prior to the movers’ arrival. There’s a company made for people like this: U-Haul.

The movers will break something or forget something. It’s OK. It happens. Just go with it. You didn’t like that lamp anyway. Don’t go crying to Yelp.

Garbage day becomes an EVENT on both sides of the move. Only six more garbage days before all this junk is gone!

If you have small children and don’t want them taking over the entire house (again), draw very firm rules about where their stuff can go prior to moving in. Then stick to your guns. If you waver for one second you’ve already lost, and your living room will for years look like a preschool.

Enjoy canceling your internet service. Kicking Comcast and their data caps and whatever “Flex” is to the curb is a special, special occasion. Now you might have to keep the same provider where you’re going, and that’s unfortunate. But if you have the ability to cancel, cherish every part of it the way you remember your wedding day.

Wherever you initially set down your keys in the new house is where you’ll keep putting them until you move out or die, whichever comes first. Think about this.

Think you’re done with those $150 trips to Target or Home Depot? You’re not.

Make a point to meet your new neighbors. There’s a tipping point at which it becomes awkward to introduce yourself to the person you’ve half-heartedly waved to every third day for the last decade. Introduce yourself BEFORE you half-heartedly wave to them every third day for the next decade.