Moving Thoughts

When you move from town to town within a state, the packing phase of the move doesn’t seem to require too much effort. I have relocated within the state of Indiana more times than I care to remember—from address to address within the same city, and several times between cities. My method has pretty much been the same: go from room to room and cram whatever I can in as few boxes as necessary, tossing out what doesn’t fit, and get it from point A to point B as quickly and as cheaply as possible.

Our move to Florida, scheduled for next weekend, is an adventure far beyond anything I have ever experienced. For one thing, there are two of us moving our stuff—in the past it’s been just me (for the most part). Secondly, we are moving about 1,000 miles—the longest distance either of us has moved. Finally, we are using a professional moving company, which in turn brings about its own issues.

The first is preparation. When you move yourself, you can load the day you want and deliver the day you want. With moving companies, you are somewhat at their mercy when it comes to scheduling—to increase their efficiency (and minimize your cost), the moving company will offer you windows, both for picking up and dropping off. What this means, in our case, is that our stuff will be departing our current residence today and will arrive at our new habitat between Tuesday, March 13, and Thursday, March 15. Not only did we have to have everything packed efficiently and completely very quickly, we had to plan out what we will need, in terms of clothes and other supplies, for the next week, as we won’t be heading down to Florida until Saturday, March 10.

The second issue is convenience. On the plus side it is nice not to have to load and unload everything. Sure, we are packing and labeling everything ourselves, but the movers will do all the heavy lifting and, when they get to our new place, will put all of the boxes, bins, and furniture in the rooms designated for each. On the negative side, because we have to have everything prepped and picked up so far ahead of our actual departure date, we will be doing without most of our creature comforts for a week—including, but not limited to, our entire wardrobes, most of our kitchen appliances, our desktop computer, our TVs and other entertainment devices, and our washer and dryer. This means we will have to plan carefully the clothes we will need for the week—not only for work, but also for recreation and travel. Too few clothes and we’ll have to find someplace to wash them; too many and we’ll have to find someplace to squeeze them when we load our cars. It also means eating off paper plates and using plastic utensils—there is a plus to that, though, as I will have far fewer dishes to wash.

The third issue is cost. There are a lot of moving companies out there, and picking one is more difficult than you might think. Sure, you could try going by cost alone, but you’ll find out that, with some exceptions, most of the companies will come within a few hundred dollars of each other. Really, for me, it came down to a gut feeling—which of the movers did I feel, based on my communication with them, would do the best job for the best price. If you haven’t used a mover, you learn that the total cost of the move is based on weight and volume. If you are paying for the move yourself (as we are), you quickly realize just how much that stuff you have been holding onto since junior high is going to run you, and you have to take a really hard look at what you “need” and what you don’t. Both my wife and I have jettisoned a lot of items, including boxes and boxes (and boxes) of books and pretty much my entire CD collection (which I ripped to the hard drive of my computer first). We’ve also donated boxes and bags of holiday décor, general décor, old (mostly cold weather) clothing, and kitchen supplies to Goodwill—and we hope they can make some money off all of it. A lot of times I found myself wondering just why in the hell I still had all of my report cards from kindergarten through high school—then I realized my mom had gone to the effort of keeping them for me, so I had held on to them, too. Now that she is gone, it made it easier to let those go. I also had to come to the realization that, despite the fact that I was really proud, at one time, to have been the eighth grade intramural boys basketball champion at Thomas Jefferson Junior High School in Valparaiso, Indiana, I no longer needed to hang on to the round, flat ceramic trophy painted to resemble a basketball. Ditto with the various and sundry award certificates I received back then, as well as with hundreds of photographs from my college and post-college days that I hadn’t looked at in more than a decade.

Right now the movers are putting our stuff in their truck. Soon it will be on the road to who knows where. For us, it’s one week of “roughing it,” then Florida, here we come.