I picked up Robert Nelson’s new book with great anticipation, and I was not disappointed. This is a really absorbing read. Adventurers Abroad is a compilation of narratives from fourteen different expats, discussing everything about the experience of living and working abroad. While this is something of acute interest to me, it should also prove worthwhile for the armchair traveler. Nelson opens the book with an introduction that includes some statistics about expats, from a study that he commissioned. He was surprised to learn that there are more Millennials out there in the expat world than there are Boomers, meaning that it is more of a phenomenon for young working people than for retirees. What surprised me was that there are 7 MILLION American expatriates! That’s up about 75% since 1999. This makes the dream of living abroad seem suddenly much more feasible. Everyone is doing it, so why can’t we? The personal narratives cover the map, literally and figuratively. There are single people, couples, and families with children of various ages. There are people who have chosen one particular country for a new home, and others who plan to relocate periodically. There are small-town Middle Americans and those who have emigrated multiple times. Some are entrepreneurs and some were placed by their employer. People moved for education, romance, professional opportunities, or simply because they were enamored with a special culture. Anyone who has any level of interest in relocating to a foreign country should consider reading Adventurers Abroad. It has a lot of “if only I had known sooner” tidbits. One theme mentioned by several people was either that doing a year of research had really paid off, or that they wished they had spent more time researching than they did. In one sense, relocating is more straightforward than we think it is: pack and go! In another sense, it is a very complex undertaking, and it’s impossible to be too prepared. Reading an upbeat, detail-filled book like this helps make the dream seem much more approachable. There is a lot of crispy brown cardboard in my life right now. I was staring into space, thinking about all the details involved in our latest move, when my gaze settled on one of the boxes in the tower across from me. It has a time estimate printed on it. It says: “Moving – 4 moves. Storage – 10-12 years.” Let’s talk about this. First of all, raise your hand if you’ve kept at least one box in its unopened state for four moves or more. Double points if it’s spent any of that time in a storage unit. Second, do you have any cardboard that has been in your life for “10-12 years” or more? I have a particular box with a lid that I realize dates back to the second year of my first marriage. That would be 1999, folks. I used to have six of them. It’s an Avon box that one of my coworkers brought over for me as my first husband and I were moving into our third and final home together, not that I knew that then. I guess I’ve kept this box because it’s still structurally sound, it’s small enough that I can carry it even when it’s packed full of heavy stuff, and it has a lid. The realization that I’ve hung onto something that is crawling with DIVORCE COOTIES has just poleaxed me into the Beyond. Of all the stupid things I’ve saved over the years, why a cardboard box, of all things? The fact that something is stored in a box is a clear, unmistakable signal that that thing is not getting used very often. If that box is taped closed, we can venture that that thing is not getting used ever, at all. Why do we keep things we don’t use? If the answer to that question were obvious, I’d be out of a job. It wouldn’t be just me out of a job, either. It would be everyone involved in the $30 billion self-storage industry. It would probably signal the end of a lot of other sectors of the economy. If we never bought anything we didn’t need or use, craft stores would be much smaller, I can tell you that right now. It’s a little chilling to think how many livelihoods depend on our living surrounded by stuff the way we do. Not just buying stuff and using stuff, but cramming it into every nook and cranny, stacking it literally to the ceiling in some cases, strewing it across the floor (in the house and in the car too), and even going so far as to rent extra space off-site to store it where we can’t even look at it. I work with squalor, hoarding, and compulsive acquisition. The way I am living over these few days of our move is not dissimilar from the way my people live ALL THE TIME. They do this every day. It makes me feel claustrophobic to think about it. Cardboard sucks in a lot of ways: it can attract termites and other insects, it’s a fire hazard, it gets damp and mildewed, it crushes and tears, and it really is not up to the task of trying to preserve our personal archives. I have comforted some very sad people who have realized that their treasures and keepsakes were ruined long ago, when that cardboard exterior had obscured the entropy that was happening inside. Most of all, though, there is that great mystery of why we are willing to live in Box City, among all these cartons and bins and tubs and totes and stacks and piles. It’s dreadful. We’ve spent half our time the past couple of days trying to find common housewares such as water glasses and scissors. I’ve packed logically and labeled carefully, but there is nothing about a stack of boxes that makes life easier. I want to finish unpacking and bust down these boxes as quickly as possible. It’s annoying to have them there, blocking my way. They look awful. Any time we need something that can’t wait until the box is unpacked, it always seems to be the one on the bottom of the stack, or behind the stack, on the bottom of a different stack. It’s impossible to relax while the darn things are there, mutely accusing us of sloth. Our TV hasn’t been turned on in two weeks, and we had just started a new season of Game of Thrones, if that tells you anything. Mainly, everything in those boxes is a useful thing. Almost all of it at the moment consists of kitchen wares, because this house was undergoing a kitchen remodel that is not yet complete. The best we have been able to do is cook in the microwave and make a taco salad. We need to unpack so we can get back to living a normal life. It’s funny, or actually it’s really sad, that other people have no trouble at all in living the way we have this week. They can cheerfully sit and watch TV, or play games, five hours a day or more, regardless of how much stuff is stacked around them, because they’re not really using or interacting with it. They may never cook a proper meal at all. As long as the electricity stays on, all they need is somewhere to sit and something for entertainment. (This does tend to imply that most of us could live happily with little more than a bed, a couch, a computer, and a TV). I truly believe that a major factor in our post-1980s clutter crisis was the advent of cable TV and home electronic gaming, followed shortly afterward by the Internet. Box City has some great shows. Our stuff says a lot about us. If it didn’t, we wouldn’t be interested in it, and we certainly wouldn’t form emotional attachments to it. For instance, if someone sent me a pair of boxing gloves, I would be puzzled, and then I would check to see if it was a mistake. We buy or keep things that speak to us in some way. I now have five boxes of books (it used to be closer to 20), and half of them are cookbooks. That’s my thing. I also have an ukulele, a unicycle, and four hula hoops, none of which, incidentally, fit well in boxes. I don’t have a wine rack, a curling iron, a gaming system, a recliner, or a barbecue. This is an inventory, not a personality assessment, but it does seem that someone could learn a little about me and my life by looking over that inventory. What do we keep? Why? More importantly, where? Are we stuffing our homes and lives with things we could never possibly use or enjoy? Are we spending money we don’t have and going into debt in order to keep buying and storing more stuff? These are good questions. I’m more interested, though, in how we want to live. How do we want to spend our days? What do we want out of life? How do we want to feel as we experience each day? If the answers to any of these questions have much to do with material possessions at all, is there enough space to use them in the way we have intended? When I spin my hula hoop, and my dog tries to jump in while I’m inside it, that gives both of us (and any onlookers) an experience that transcends the hoop itself. Keeping things is fine, but it’s better when they are actively contributing to our life in some way. [I lost track of this post during the move, but it still seems worth sharing. I can hardly believe that it was written just two weeks ago! This feels like a proper home now. The kitchen has been fully operational and there are no remaining boxes in the house. The pictures are hung, the closets are organized, and even the garage is done. In another week, we’ll have forgotten the stress of the move. Hopefully that won’t stop us from continuing to release possessions we don’t want to move to our next house, however many years down the road that might be]. Time passing is marked in so many different ways. We remember major events based on their significance in our lives, and after a few years, we may have to rack our brains to figure out the date. My parents used to ask me how old I was, because my birth was one of their mileposts. We remember what car we were driving, whether we were still in school, who was born, who got married, who was still alive. For me, the main milepost is where I was living. This is the 28th house of my adult life. This time, the move closely corresponds with a new year, which is my other favorite time marker. It makes me think of everything that has changed in my life since the last time we moved. When we moved into our now-old house, we had had a challenging year. We were coming to roost after three moves in about seven months, with two job changes to boot. We thought we were going to have to move to Alabama, a place thousands of miles from friends and family, where we knew nobody whosoever, on two weeks’ notice. Somehow, miraculously, my husband secured a better job here in Southern California instead. Our heads were still spinning, and I still had my Alabama road trip spreadsheet on my home screen. My stepdaughter had just started her first semester of college, and we were living as empty nesters for the first time in our marriage. We rented the house at the last minute, signing the papers electronically in the car on the way back to our old-old house. Neither of us had ever lived in such a tight rental market before, and we were bewildered by the way that every house we saw for rent was unavailable later the same day the listing was posted. The pace of life had changed in the same way as the speed of freeway traffic. When we moved in, we had four things on our minds, aside from the matter of our kid’s fresh independence weighing on our hearts.
Losing the extra weight took a bit longer. I had put on 17 pounds in 2013, and my health was in a tailspin. I wasn’t sleeping, I was getting migraines on a weekly basis, and I was having fibromyalgia flare-ups for the first time in over a decade. The stress had caught up to me. I already knew quite well that all my various health issues correlate perfectly with weight gain, and there was nothing in the extra visceral fat that was pleasing or helpful to my life. I could only really fit in two pairs of pants and three shirts, and we couldn’t exactly afford to buy me an entire new wardrobe. I started running again: 38 miles per pound burned. Then I started keeping a food log, and I decided to make “healthy weight for my height” my goal weight. I went on a strict diet for three months. That changed my life. For most of the 2 years since we moved to that house, I have stayed in the 120-125 pound range (I’m 5’4”). I also trained for, and ran, my first marathon. Oh, and I did wind up with a whole new wardrobe, just two sizes smaller instead of two sizes larger. We came to SoCal in a state of chaos. Our family life had been sundered, we were broke, our truck was on its last legs, our dog seemed to be dying, the movers broke some of our stuff, and we were moving into a dumpy little place down the street from a smoke shop, a massage parlor, and a Popeye’s Chicken franchise. Two years later, everything is different. The new vet put our dog on a new medication regimen for his Addison’s disease, and he’s so frisky at 7 that nobody would ever guess he is ill. I have transformed from an overweight, ill, headachy person to a lean marathoner. My husband got promoted into management. I started my coaching business. Our kid has been getting straight A’s. The old truck died with over 200,000 miles on it, and we replaced it with (don’t laugh) a VW Jetta, just in time for the emissions scandal. Moving again is exciting. I can only wonder what will happen in our lives in the next two years, or rather, what we will make happen. Last time, we felt that we were at the mercy of fate. This time, we are moving under our own power, a steamship instead of a storm-tossed sailboat. We are “done” with many of the crises that distracted us last time. “Done” with the health problems and the weight gain. “Done” with the high-maintenance old vehicle. “Done” with parenting; she’s 21, independent, and thriving. “Done” with downsizing and streamlining our stuff. The new house was just remodeled and meticulously detailed by our landlord. There’s nothing for us to fix. In the New Year, in this new home, all there is for us to do is to live and to grow into a bigger life. Monday: Hubby’s first day walking to work. He texts me: 1.44 miles and 26 minutes. This is why we moved – so we can have a taste of pre-freeway, pre-television life.
I start unpacking before breakfast, trying to empty a few more boxes before going back to the house to meet the junk haulers. They are supposed to call half an hour before arrival, which is scheduled sometime between 1 and 3 PM. They show up at 12:40 without calling first. I’m still on the road, so they wind up sitting in their truck in our driveway and waiting in the 80 degree heat. The company is called College Hunks Hauling Junk. I figured they were just being funny, until I got a good look at these fine young fellows. I could have sons that age, but if I did, they wouldn’t be nearly that good looking. Is this a thing? Model-gorgeous moving men as a marketing gimmick? Or is it just that SoCal is loaded with preternaturally attractive people? Landlord comes over and gives me a very touching farewell speech. He says we are “very excellent” and “the best people” and that he will miss us. He thanks us for everything and hopes our pets are adjusting well. He is a gentle soul who spends most of his time growing roses since his stroke a few years ago. I feel good about our rent money having gone to his care and maintenance. Spend 90 minutes washing windows. Bring back another carload. It really seemed like the house was almost empty. A few pans here, some canning jars there, a couple of lamps, and suddenly the car is full again. I drop off the ill-fated return phone at the post office and head home. Hubby meets me and helps unload, so we can head back again to clean. Stop to assemble our desks. Drive back to old house for two hours of work. I clean the bathrooms and the kitchen while he takes down pictures and putties holes in the wall. We have to go back one more time for the walk-through. Finish at 9:30, too late to go out, and wind up eating taco salad at home at 10. Tuesday: Have breakfast outside on new deck. Feed a tiny mandarin to Noelie, who eats about ½ tsp and throws the rest to the dog. Unpack and organize a few more things. Figure out the new washing machine. Scrub off the paint transferred onto the car from where I backed into the gate yesterday. Change our address with USPS. Try to catch up on email. Mostly just wait around for new landlord to show up with the missing drawer fronts and cabinet doors, so I can start unpacking the kitchen. Go back to old house for final cleanup; half an hour of mopping and loading up the last few things. Amazing: the cleansers, mops, brooms, and flower pots make up an entire carload. House is immaculate and empty. I can preserve the visual of the final perimeter check for reassurance whenever I can’t find something and wonder if it got left behind. (It couldn’t have been). Wednesday: Be careful what you wish for! The work crew knocks just after I step out of the shower, and I have to run to the door in a towel and ask them to give me a minute. It takes about 3 hours to hang the cabinet doors, replace the drawers, install a shelf and smoke detectors, and put down wood strips at the floor thresholds. Spend another 3 hours unpacking the kitchen. Exhausting, but it’s done, and I cook dinner. Thursday: Organize more of the laundry room, clearing enough space that a shelving unit can be set up. Venture into the garage. Several boxes belong in the office. Where are we going to put this stuff?? We’re close to the point where we could run a functional household and stop dealing with the mess in the garage and laundry room. All we have to do is stop any recreational or athletic activities and put our hobbies on hold, and we’re golden. Break down the empty boxes I have stacked outside the back door, fortunately, because it rains only a couple of hours later. Walk the dog to meet hubby at work. He is delighted. Friday: The demoralizing dregs. Each room has a couple of partial boxes with items that need to be carefully placed, because the available storage is almost completely full. “Office” consists of the pets’ crates, a bookshelf, our desks, and a bunch of boxes that are still taped closed. I set up a folding table in the kitchen. Hubby sets up the desktop computer and a couple of shelving units for the laundry room and garage. The Dementors have gotten out of the MISC boxes and are hovering around. Saturday: We go back to the old house to wait for the recyclers to come pick up the old refrigerator. I discover that one kitchen drawer was left full of stuff! So much for my “final” perimeter check. Throw it in a bag. While on that side of town, the dog gets taken to the vet, car gets washed, Goodwill donations get dropped off, old keys get mailed to property manager, and we stop for groceries. After this we’ll have to figure out where to do all these errands in our new city. We work together to clear the laundry room and garage at the new house. A few specific empty electronics boxes go into the small loft area at the top of the garage. The rest of the shelving units are assembled and organized. I push through the last couple of boxes in the living room. Sunday: We have two choices: put up the work bench in the garage and finish the office, or enjoy the gorgeous weather and go for the distance walk we had planned. We walk about 9 ½ miles, getting home about an hour before a heavy rainstorm hits. The ice maker in the fridge has malfunctioned, leaking a very large puddle of water on the kitchen floor, which has of course saturated the bottom of the last remaining box. Moral: this is why we unpack our boxes and don’t leave cardboard on the floor. We first heard of the existence of this house 28 days ago. Now we live here. The bedroom, bathroom, kitchen, and laundry room are fully operational. There is no art on the walls yet. The living room is a work in progress, as we’re using a mishmash of old furniture until we have time to get a new couch. The garage can accommodate projects, and it’ll be “done done” with another hour’s work. I’d love to say the office is done, too, because that would mean we’re fully moved in. Then I do the math. We’ve slept here 9 nights. It’s actually pretty impressive that all our furniture is put together and we’re 90% unpacked already. We’ll most likely finish by dinnertime tonight. That’s because 1. We don’t have a lot of stuff, 2. We can’t bear to live in cluttered surroundings, and 3. All our “free time” has been directed toward completing the move. Moving is part annoyance, part drudgery, and part excitement. The proportion depends almost entirely on how much cubic clutter there is. We are three weeks into the process of moving into a new house. If you’ve moved recently, you know exactly what I mean. If this is not something you do often, you may have forgotten how physically demanding it is. We are still surrounded by towers of unpacked boxes, so it is very fresh in my mind. I’ve had plenty of occasion to think about the interplay of physical fitness, relocating, material possessions, and personal environment. It is immediately obvious only minutes into a move that it takes its toll on the body. This is my 28th move as an adult. The great thing about it is that this is the first one I have done as a marathon runner. I’m also a backpacker, and this fall I spent a total of six days carrying a 45-pound pack up and down various trails. While I am 40 years old, this has been the easiest move for me physically. (Other than trying to knock myself unconscious by whacking my forehead on a door frame, that is!) Moving Day was 8 hours of carrying extremely heavy things, like my elliptical, an industrial sewing machine, and umpteen boxes of books, and this was after five days of climbing up and down on chairs, packing and stacking boxes, and carrying them up a series of steps into the new house. I’m tired, sure, but I haven’t had to take any anti-inflammatories. As a former chronic pain and fatigue sufferer, I know that pain comes in many varieties. There’s the “time to go to the hospital” kind of pain: a fractured finger, various sprained fingers and a wrist, a severe muscle strain (when the muscle begins to separate from the bone), a dislocated rib, a dislocated hip. There’s the chronic stuff: the carpal tunnel syndrome, the tennis elbow, the tendonitis. There’s fibromyalgia, about which the less said, the better. Then there’s DOMS, or “delayed onset muscle soreness.” Even for very fit people, DOMS may kick in when we’ve started doing new routines. The comment after this is often “I’m sore in places I didn’t know I had places!” I had one day of this, in my quads, the first day after I had been squatting and lifting boxes. My poor hubby is still dealing with it. Part of the difference is that he has a sedentary job, while I’m up and down all day doing chores in between work segments. The other part is that, while he is very strong, I have kept up a regular fitness routine over the past two years, and he has not. He’s the control and I’m the variable. Adding data to the experiment of our latest move, I wear an Apple Watch. I was chagrined to discover that I only burned an extra 200 calories on the day we spent 8 hours doing strenuous physical labor. That’s like a can of Pepsi and three Ritz crackers. I also barely made the goal of elevating my heartrate for 30 minutes. This is just one of many times when tracking my health metrics has clearly shown that I overestimate how often I exercise, how long my workouts are, what intensity I work, and how functionally fit I am. (Of course, I also tend to seriously underestimate how much I eat and how often I eat desserts). The other thing about the Watch is that I tend to pace laps around the house when I’m close to my exercise goal and it’s dark or cold outside. Moving into a significantly smaller house (728 square feet) that is full of stacks of boxes has made this less feasible. Most of my clutter clients absolutely could not walk a lap through each room of their home. They tend to fill each room with as much furniture as they can find, constricting the available space. Then they add stacks of bins, tubs, totes, boxes, cartons, and tottering towers of books, mail, and other reading material. THEN they add laundry and other small items, such as cat toys, to the floor. My people think nothing of turning sideways to get through a confined space, or picking their way over landmines of potential tripping hazards. They’re used to it, for one thing, but for another thing, they tend not to get up off their chairs, couches, or beds unless they have to. There is a night and day difference between being a fit person in a clear space and being a sedentary person in a cluttered space. I walk much faster and go through a much wider range of motion than I did when I was ill, just doing things like scrubbing the tub and carrying laundry, and that’s part of how I’m able to maintain my hard-earned muscle mass with far less effort than I ever imagined. Conversely, because I worked so hard to get fit, it’s also much easier to keep my home clean and clear. Another thing that has stood out for me during this move is just how many of our material possessions relate to physical fitness and a more active lifestyle. Right now, our garage is just as full as ¾ of other typical American garages, because we’ve only been sleeping here three nights and we’re still processing stuff. That bulk includes an elliptical, a treadmill, a stair climber, a pull-up bar, and all our backpacking gear. In another garage, the same space could easily be filled by holiday decorations, boxes of memorabilia, and old magazines. Another garage might also contain the identical fitness equipment that we have, except that it might be further surrounded by so many other things that it has not been used. Perhaps not in months or years, perhaps never. We often feel that owning something checks the box, that once we’ve bought it, we’ve changed our lives. STUFF is about whether we make the space and time to use it even more than it is about whether we own it. We don’t really need any of our fitness equipment. You can do absolutely every last thing that a top endurance athlete does, with no equipment at all, by walking and running outdoors and by learning how to do high intensity interval training and body weight workouts. Even walking 20 minutes a day and doing a plank pose for a few seconds once a day can build fitness. Heck, sitting on the floor and getting back up again once a day would be a dramatic improvement for many people. It counts. All of these activities are easier when we can clear at least a tiny amount of space in just one room, and when we start to bring our awareness to how we spend our time. I just have fitness equipment because I like to distract myself with passive entertainment (books, true crime shows, podcasts) while I work out. It’s more practical than packing up my worldly goods and rearranging them for a few hours every day. Moving to a new home is an opportunity to adjust one’s lifestyle. We chose to move closer to my husband’s office so that he can walk to work instead of commuting on the freeway. We choose to limit our possessions to what will fit comfortably in the available space, because the space itself is more valuable to us (and costs more each month) than any of our belongings. We choose to eat healthy food and to be active, because we’re getting older and we understand that we are running out of time to build the bodies that will carry us through old age. We choose how we spend our time. The result of each of these decisions and choices has compounded into a pretty nice life. I am deep in a dream when the jingling of the bells on our front doorknob snaps me awake. It’s my husband, an extreme lark by constitution, bringing oatmeal and tea. It’s 7 AM and we can’t pick up the moving van for two hours. Meanwhile, I’m not completely sure of my name or what century it is. We get into a conversation that ends in me doing a Keith Richards impression and him declaring that he is Cookie Monster. By the time I get out of the shower, he has already removed the legs from all the furniture in the house. The listing for our new rental house went up 19 days ago. I was 1000 miles away at the time, and saw only photographic evidence of it before we filled out the application and provided half a dozen references and our credit reports. It was somewhat like believing in Sasquatch, but mainly because he was going to be your new college roommate. I came home just in time for us to leave again for Thanksgiving. Technically we have had only five days to pack. This… exciting… timeline is further compounded by the fact that the house is barely half the size of our old house, a whopping 728 square feet, or smaller than the average Hollywood closet. I would use ‘swimming pool’ as a unit of measure but that goes without saying. I work as an organizer and clutter coach, and this is the 28th move of my adult life. So I feel quite confident in my plan that we can move and unpack two carloads a day the week before the move, reuse the same 20 boxes several times, have everything unpacked into the closets and cupboards, and simply drop all the furniture into place on moving day. Magically, the crock pot and bread machine will finish together, and we’ll sit down to a hot home cooked meal. People say I’m a dreamer… I still insist that this plan could have worked. It could! Unfortunately, each of the staging areas we planned to use is unavailable. There are drawer fronts and cabinet doors missing in the kitchen and linen closet, waiting to be rehung, and there are two extremely bulky pieces of furniture in the garage waiting to be hauled off. They belonged to a previous tenant, and nobody really wants them. At least an actual white elephant might provide some company for our dog during the day. Maybe it could also stomp flat some of our empty boxes. Alas, it is merely a metaphorical white elephant. The result has been that we have created a “staging area” (read: very large pile) in the laundry room, and our garage looks like a Standard American Garage rather than the laborrrratory it is supposed to be. If any Mad Science happens out there in the next two weeks, it is going to have to involve nanobots. The kitchen is getting unpacked last instead of first, which also rules out any interesting chemistry experiments. If this continues we will have to resort to poetry. The office cabinet shown in the picture above is not the result of a failed rocketry experiment, although that would have made a great YouTube video. It’s because we have a California King mattress, which sort of implies by its very name that it should come with a Valet de Mattress Hauling and at least a couple of serfs. (Serfs up!) What does our quarter-acre mattress have to do with the pile of kindling we once called vital storage space? Okay. We are stubborn and frugal people of blue collar extraction, which often tends to result in fraught storylines. We did the move ourselves. That means 5’4”, 123-lb me holding my end up of something heavy, wobbly, and higher than my head, while my 6’2” hockey playing, ex-logger husband holds up the other. We are trying to shove the mattress through a hallway that is shorter than the mattress is long, while simultaneously pushing it through two doorways and a 90-degree bend. It is much like trying to stuff a loaf of bread into an envelope, or trying to coax the actual white elephant mentioned earlier into a gym locker. It is like trying to shove a sleeping bag into a compression sack. It is like trying to pull on a pair of skinny jeans after stopping at Cinnabon. I am so busy thinking up good analogies for this process that I quit paying attention to what I am doing, and nearly cold-cock myself on the door frame. The resulting linear goose egg on my forehead is the sort of mark that could lead either to a lot of concerned inquiries about my marriage, or an adjunct professorship at Hogwarts. After I get up off the floor, we realize that we need to get caster cups for the bed frame anyway. We leave the mattress in situ. I sit down for a few minutes, a bit woozy, and then finish unloading the remaining boxes in the van, so we can head back for the second load. After riding across town for half an hour, I feel fine, but decide to stop for a snack. My hubby decides to keep going, driven by the strict 7 PM time cutoff on the van, while writing me off as a casualty for the day. Before I have finished eating my energy bar, he has loaded up the cabinet and rolled it out the front door. I have no idea any of this operation is underway until I hear him say, “Well, I guess that’s not going with us.” When the expression “close shave” is used, it generally does not mean a literal attempt to shave tangible, real-life beard stubble off of a man. (Or woman. I don’t judge). See photo. Fortunately, cabinetry is an inefficient means of decapitation; if ever you should need cranial removal services, say, during the coming zombie apocalypse, my vote is for a custom chainsaw prosthesis. Speaking of chainsaws, we have this broken old IKEA couch which has been propped up by an anvil on one end for the past several months. I have forced this issue because it has made no sense to me to replace the couch when we are planning to relocate anyway, and don’t know the shape, size, or color of our future living closet. We have decided to bust it up ourselves and throw it in the curbside bin, rather than pay for a junk hauler. This decision has been undecided for us by the clutter gods, Whoops and Ohdang. The cabinet has just gone to Stuff Heaven, newly glinting meta-hardware sparkling around its aetherial doors. The interior space is gone while only the shell remains. We call the junk haulers.
Next comes the moving of the elliptical machine. One would think that moving such a thing up an incline would be much more difficult than rolling it down a ramp. One would think wrong. Ah well. It is a machine designed to provide a workout and build physical fitness, and arguably, it is succeeding. We have a moment of destiny while on the ramp. Hubby is in the van, pulling the heavy end of the machine backward on the handcart. I am standing on the ramp, pushing the handlebar end, which is precariously balanced on a furniture dolly, a flimsy item that resembles an empty picture frame with a wheel on each corner. As the heavy machine is levered off the ramp into the van bed, the dolly slides free and rolls toward me. This is when I thank Past Self for all the years of distance running, yoga, and dance classes. I simply step through the frame, one foot at a time, and it rolls down the ramp behind me, sounding like a series of roller skates being thrown into a dumpster. I prefer this to the alternative of being squashed flat by a glorified hamster wheel. Core strength FTW. Somehow we get the van returned on time. We buy another ten boxes. We load another carload. We get it home and unloaded. We get the caster cups. We eat large steaming bowls of Japanese food, where the waitress tells us that she pays $1400 a month for a studio apartment. (I don’t ask, but it may be larger than our new house…) We go home and make the bed, which in this case starts with the frame and box springs. The odyssey of our first night in our new home begins. While my lawfully wedded spouse is a lark, I am a night owl. He is capable of falling asleep before his head hits the pillow, and I don’t mean to imply decapitation again, not so soon anyway, but there is that whole ‘sawing logs’ thing. I realize we are living close to railroad tracks again. I finally fall asleep, only to wake up at 2:30, broiling hot, and get up to look for the thermostat. At 3 AM I realize that I don’t know where the package with my broken old phone that needs to be returned has wound up. At 4:30, I get an impromptu lesson in fluid mechanics and cavitation in old pipes; as the automatic sprinklers kick on, a banging and shuddering indicates that trapped underneath the house is the ghost of the Tin Woodman. I decide to go get my phone and listen to Mystery Show for a while. At 5:30 I finally fall back to sleep. My husband breathes the deep, peaceful breaths of the only carbon-based lifeform in our galaxy who could conceivably share a mattress with me. At 7, a flock of no fewer than 50 wild parrots flies over our house, a fact that our own parrot finds exhilarating and inspirational, which she demonstrates by imitating, to the last decibel, the backup beep of a garbage truck. Which makes our dog bark, or perhaps he is trying to whistle, in which case, wow. In other words, it’s a fairly normal Sunday morning. Feels like home already. Here continues the adventure of our downsizing move, in which I find a rental listing while I am out of town, my husband looks it over, and three days later it’s ours. We thought the new house has 63% of the square footage of our current house, but it turns out it’s actually 53%! The listing was updated, and it says 728 square feet rather than 881. The discrepancy most likely has to do with the addition of the laundry room to the detached garage, or perhaps a transdimensional portal. Monday: We meet our landlords to sign the papers. They are busy, too, and we can’t meet until 8:30 PM. As predicted last week, the construction is not 100% complete, and we agree that they will finish the last tiny touchup tasks over the next few days. That’s fine, because we’ll only be moving a few carloads before the weekend, while continuing to sleep at what is now officially The Old House. They offer to lend us a van! Surreal Hollywood moment when the landlord mentions my book, Iceland by Bus and Backpack. It’s self-published and copies sold are still in the three digit range, but I feel FAMOUS for about 15 seconds. In the year the house was built, such a conversation would indeed have indicated something special; now it just means Google. We unload the folding office bookcase and three sets of plastic storage shelves in the garage, which still has all the construction materials it had last week. I have brought over some hand soap and TP for the bathroom. See that the landlords have left a bird’s nest undisturbed in the porch rafters, which touches my heart. They also put a welcome mat at the back door. (Finished Week 9 of my online class and took the final, finishing with 40 minutes to spare. Also tracked down a notary public. Turned in my last library books, a bittersweet moment. A busy day overall!) Tuesday: I wake up to a large empty space in my husband’s office. Only 7:30 AM and already he has moved a carload on his way to work. I set to work taping together my portion of the new boxes, realizing partway through that I am doing this before breakfast. Drop my phone, shatter the screen, swear a lot, and submit a claim against my phone insurance, all in 20 minutes. Pack my quota of 11 boxes, the capacity of our car, and leave on the bus for an advance screening of a major new movie, because my life is so Hollywood. (This means standing in line for an hour and surrendering all your electronics at the door, which in my case is a lot like asking Red Sonja or Xena, Warrior Princess to divest themselves of weaponry, except the glass slivers coming out of the plastic wrap around my phone may be more dangerous right now. I sometimes sheath my phone in my boot as well). Hubby fills car with my boxes and picks me up at the bus stop. We drop off our first rent check and unpack. The empty boxes go back in the car for tomorrow. Work has clearly been done on the house since yesterday; a few cabinet doors and drawer fronts are missing in the kitchen and linen closet. They were not painted to the landlord’s standards and he is having them redone. This makes unpacking a bit of a challenge, though; I had planned to do the kitchen first, since kitchens consist almost entirely of built-in storage. I mentally rejigger what gets moved on which day. Half the garage is still a work in progress as well; the construction debris has been cleared, but there are still some large pieces of furniture (hutches?) waiting to be hauled away. So far we’ve moved half my clothes, my husband’s bookcase of textbooks, some kitchen appliances and canning jars, the garage shelves, and a lot of random garage items, most of which can’t be put away yet. The planning philosophy of moving Stuff We are Keeping But Won’t Use for at Least a Week is creating some odd priorities and juxtapositions. Wine glasses and the ironing board, cocktail dresses and sprinkler heads, croquet mallets and hiking boots and my chainmail bikini top. I spent 59 minutes packing my 11 boxes. We were at the house for 46 minutes, unloading, unpacking, and handling the rent check. Had a late dinner at a Lebanese restaurant we once tried that is, unbelievably, only 6 minutes away now. Wednesday: New phone arrives at 9 AM! Our pets are a little anxious, since we haven’t been home in the evenings, and I give them some extra cuddle time on the couch while messing with my phone transfer. Noelie rarely sits on my shoulder, but in the past couple of weeks she has wanted to ride around with me. These are moments of stillness in the maelstrom. I spend some extra time with a pencil and a blank sheet of paper, doing a brain dump and drawing diagrams of where our remaining furniture will go in the new rooms. Drinking a cup of tea and taking some deep breaths, I make some strategic decisions that leave me feeling much calmer. Choose what I’m going to wear the rest of the week and pack the rest of the clothes in my closet. Wash bedding. Spend the rest of my afternoon dealing with the logistics of the move: reserving a moving van FOR SATURDAY, working out which extra equipment to rent, finding someone to haul away our broken old couch, looking for a dealer who might buy our washer and dryer. Extremely impressed with the U-Haul website. Cook a pot of soup while hubby loads the car. Eat dinner, drive over, sit in nighttime construction traffic. Get to the new house and discover that, TODAY, the landlord has had the entire kitchen floor ripped out, installed new subflooring, and put down new Pergo. All due to a slight squeak at the threshold to the living room. This guy is a FINISHER par excellence. Respect. The ceiling vents have been replaced, a wall plate is put in, and the nicest blinds I’ve ever had have been installed in all the rooms. We are joking about dragging out the move to see how many other upgrades he will do! We unload the car, including one bag of frozen food for the freezer. Stop at our new grocery store and pick up dog food and dog cookies. Come home and set out more unboxable items for tomorrow morning’s load. My time today: 61 minutes packing, loading, unloading, and unpacking. 65 minutes travel time, including grocery store. Considerably longer setting up my new phone. Thursday: New phone is working in every way except being an actual telephone. Spend a lot of time and customer service calls trying to figure out why, which turns out to be a matter of finding the SIM card. Ohhh… The past three days, I have spent nearly as much time dealing with my smartphone as with my house move, which says a lot about my life. Spend a total of 2 hours 19 minutes on packing and moving. Nothing has been done at the new house today, meaning I still can’t unpack in the kitchen or the linen closet, and we still can’t set up the garage shelving. Vexed. Interesting how my positive feelings about the surprise new flooring only lasted one day. I am an ingrate. Pick a bag of mandarins in the dark for hubby’s coworkers. Go home and eat leftovers from all the soup I made this week. Almost everything that has been packed and moved has come from inside closets, cupboards, cabinets, and the garage. The bedroom looks untouched. Hubby’s office is obviously the main staging area. Until tonight, nothing at all had been packed from the living room. Now I have a cardboard monument stacked in the middle of the room, waiting for the rest of the books and incidentals. The illusion we have been able to maintain of ordinary daily life is now vaporizing. Tomorrow I am going to have to bust some serious butt getting ready for the big move, now under 36 hours away. Friday: Sleep in a bit. Spend an hour on the phone scheduling Internet hookup, changing addresses with various service providers, finding out just how hard it is to get a broken old couch hauled away. We decide to cut it up and put it in the trash. As I was packing yesterday, I boxed up all our anti-inflammatories, and realized it had been months since I had last taken one. I’m definitely a bit sore and tired from climbing up and down to reach high shelves, carrying boxes of books and the fireproof safe, and spending all week doing unaccustomed deep knee bends. But it’s getting done. This is one area where physical fitness pays a large dividend. Spent 70 minutes on packing. Mutually decided we would skip the trip to the house tonight and go out for Mexican food. Hubby got out the drill and took apart his work benches. He also boxed up the TV screen. I saw the way he had carefully taped all the screws from his desk to one side with a lattice of masking tape, and my heart melted. Gotta have a Tool Man! The kitchen is almost completely packed. All the books are done. The closets are all ¾ done. Everything on the walls is still there. We’re planning to do the cleanup on Sunday, which means packing all the cleaning tools and supplies that day. It will probably also mean some last-minute stuff we won’t feel like dealing with when we have the van, which has a 10-hour time limit. Saturday: Hubby brings home breakfast at 7 and we work for an hour before picking up the moving van. Two trips with the van. Returned it at 7 PM with 20 minutes to spare. 8 hours 48 minutes packing and moving, 3 hours 47 minutes travel time. Pack another carload afterward. 90% finished with each room = a LOT of small, random items remaining. Stop at hardware store. Find a veg-friendly sushi joint a couple minutes away and eat a late dinner. Go home (HOME!) and set up bed. Actually, this summary is missing all the drama and funny parts. Come back tomorrow. Sunday: Another heinously early start. Woke up to flock of wild parrots flying over our house! Hurrying to pack up and clean up, while returning to meet internet installer at 3 PM. They call twice to try to move up the appointment, but we can’t leave because we’re at the old house waiting for a junk removal appointment that falls through and has to be rescheduled anyway. Get that done and make a second trip. I’ll be going back tomorrow to meet the junk hauler, the fridge recycler, and an important mail delivery that we don’t want getting stuck in Forwarding Limbo. At this point, the bedroom and bathroom are completely set up and unpacked. The pets have a spot for their sleeping crates. The fridge and freezer are set up, and we have functional utensil drawers. We have internet and we have everything we need to do laundry. I don’t really want to talk about the garage, laundry room, or kitchen right now. We first learned of the existence of this house on November 17, precisely 20 days ago, and now we’re already sleeping here. Tune in next week for the latest installment of our adventures in downsizing. Oh, and tomorrow, for the hilarity known as MOVING DAY. Here continues the adventure of our downsizing move, in which I find a rental listing while I am out of town, my husband looks it over, and three days later it’s ours. The new house has 63% of the square footage of our current house. Monday: Hubby picks me up at airport. I throw my suitcase in the back seat and change from a sweater to the sleeveless top he brought me, since it was 32 F when I left that morning and it’s 82 F now. Two minutes later, we pull up in front of our new house. Two neighbors are waiting for us. (We’re early). We get the tour and wind up hanging around for over an hour, meeting everyone on the block and eating mandarins off the tree in OUR NEW BACK YARD! The most recent addition to the neighborhood (besides us) has lived there a mere 18 years. It transpires that two of the neighbors have banded together and bought our house cooperatively, perhaps so they can collectively vet tenants. We learn that we were the first of 84+ callers. I’m in love with the house! It seems smaller in person, but also cuter. I like the exterior color better. Most of the storage didn’t really make it into the photos, something very interesting to note the next time I trust my husband to pick out a house for us. Extra cabinets – always a happy surprise! We go home with a sack of mandarins and grapefruits, chattering about what furniture will go where. At home, more boxes are taped up and ready to pack. He’s working hard on his office. He’s packed his books in the same order they were on the shelves, so unpacking them will be the work of minutes. We’ve planned to bring over the bookshelves and garage shelving first, so we can unpack directly onto them in their permanent locations. The house is so small that there really isn’t a viable staging area in any room that would accommodate a stack of boxes, not unless we decide to forego furniture. Tuesday: Unpack from my trip, do two loads of laundry, put fresh sheets on the bed, hang fresh towels, vacuum the bedroom. Do perimeter check, looking in each room of the house and identifying items that will not be moving to the new house. Call the vet to schedule dog’s booster shots and arrange boarding for parrot for the weekend. Pack for tomorrow, refilling all the little bottles in my shower kit. Talk more about furniture placement at the new place. Wednesday: Leave at 8 AM. Stop by pet resort. Twelve hour road trip, including search for a notary public during our lunch stop. Go to grocery store at 9 PM to pick up items for Thanksgiving dinner. Check into hotel, unpack, set up dog crate, cook dinner in paper cups in the room microwave, scorch a potato and fill room with smell of burning. Share broken fork from my suitcase. Thursday: Thanksgiving. Hubby works for a couple hours before we head over. I work on an online class I’m taking. Family time. Back to hotel, where I take the midterm of my online class. Write, illustrate, and format Friday’s blog post. Friday: Both of us working in the morning. Work on Week 6 of my class. Family time. Saturday: Up early, pack, check out of hotel. Another twelve hour road trip. Spend much of the time talking about the new house and our plans for the New Year. Get home and unpack. Finish Week 6 of my class. Carry empty boxes out to car and establish that 6 will fit in the back seat and 5 in the trunk. Plan is to do two 11-box loads per day. Sunday: Take dog to vet for his booster shots. Pick up bird. Go out for breakfast and talk about the move. Come home and give dog a bath and trim his nails. Run vacuum and mop (robotically, thank goodness). Husband packs boxes to free up garage shelving for first load. I do Week 7 and 8 of my online class and make a pot of soup, just in time to receive very sad family news. This week we’ll get the keys and find out whether the remodel is complete. Last we saw it, kitchen cabinet doors were being installed on what were formerly open shelves. The doors were hung but the handles had not been attached, and the floor still had a layer of paper taped down. A faucet was being replaced. There were some light fixtures being rewired and there was some construction going on in the garage. We were told that someone would be brought in to clean up after the construction debris was removed. A lot can happen in a week, but we’re also prepared for the possibility that they may need more time. Our plan is to continue to anti-pack (more on this topic on Tuesday) and box up only what we absolutely know we want to bring to the new house. So far I have finished off a jar of sauerkraut, a bottle of ginger juice, and a pound of split peas from the pantry. My husband has put one item in the donation bag and set aside several other things for recycling and eBay. We have some furniture and other large items to advertise. We still need to reserve a moving van. We have 20 small boxes and two large boxes, plus a few others of various sizes that may or may not be used, since they are not as modular as the newly purchased ones. Last time we moved, we had 100 boxes; some were larger, but we’ve gotten rid of a lot in the last two years, and hopefully we will not exceed this amount. If we reuse the new boxes by unpacking as we go and refilling them, that means five trips. Tune in next week for the latest installment of our adventures in downsizing. We’re moving again. If I’m counting right, this will be the 28th time I have moved since 1993. As a married couple, it will be our fifth since 2009, and technically there are six in there because we converged two households when we got married. At time of writing, I have not yet seen the house in person. I thought it could be interesting to post about the process of planning and organizing the move from a minimalist perspective. Why are we moving again? In 2013, we moved three times in seven months, so one would think we’d want to put down deeper roots. When we rented our current house, we had a tight deadline, and every house we called about was already rented. The house we got had only been on Craigslist for 45 minutes, and there were two other families looking at it when we went for the tour the next morning. I filled in all the applications on my phone in the car while we drove back to Sacramento. We didn’t know the area well, and we figured we would stay put while we learned our way around and figured out our dream neighborhood. Now we know where that is. We’re excited about this move! We’re downsizing again. Each time we have moved, the kitchen and garage have had half the storage of the previous house, meaning we’re at a quarter of where we started. This time, the garage will be bigger, but the rest of the house will be smaller. We’re in a 3 bedroom, 2 bath, 1386 square foot house, built in 1961. The new house is 881 square feet with 2 bedrooms and one bathroom. ONE. BATHROOM. (When I was a kid, five of us shared one bathroom. As an adult, I’ve started to think that personal bathrooms are one of the secrets to a relaxed married life). This house was built circa 1930, and it’s extremely interesting to me how house sizes have inflated over the years, adding roughly 300 square feet per decade. In a sense, we’re going back in time. Not only will we have a vintage house, we’ll have a vintage commute, as my husband will be close enough to walk to work. Okay, enough about the house! Let’s talk about moving! Step One: We discussed what we wanted in a house long before we decided to move. (#1: No carpets. SUCCESS!) We agreed that certain things were expendable and would not be relocating with us. We assume that an international relocation may one day be a part of the career ladder, which is THRILLING, and thus gradual downsizing has been working well for us. It’s a mutual dream. Step Two: We started looking for a house. This is the fourth one we tried. We called on the first day it was listed. There were 83 applications besides ours! Tuesday: See link in Trulia email, forward to hubby, about an hour after reaching my parents’ house from the airport. He responds 7 minutes later saying he has called. Wednesday: He tours the house, while other rival renters are present, and takes 56 photos. Sends me the photos in our shared album, which I pore over. Fill out lengthy application, contact three personal references each, send Dropbox links and Contact cards back and forth over phone. Thursday: Supply credit reports, also doing mine remotely. Friday: Learn that we have the house! Give notice to current property manager. They respond with 12/19 move-out date. Saturday: Hubby buys some empty boxes. Sunday: He starts packing his office, filling five boxes. I’ll be seeing the house and meeting the property manager to sign papers immediately after landing at the airport on Monday (day of posting). We are to receive the keys, even though technically we don’t take occupancy until the first. Note that this is Thanksgiving week. Since the house is so close to my husband’s work, the plan is for him to take over a trunkful of small boxes each day. Then he can drive home as usual, pick me up, and we can unpack a second carload. This will allow me to have most of the kitchen moved in before we spend a night there, and we’ll be able to unpack many things (such as clothes) as we go. By the time we hire a moving van for the things that won’t fit in our car, the “fiddly bits” will be long gone. We can unpack and reuse boxes for multiple loads. This is the plan. That doesn’t necessarily mean it will work out according to plan. What we have going for us is that our current house is clean and we don’t have all that much stuff. The last time we moved, we had 100 boxes in total, and several of those contained only one item, such as a lamp or a comforter. We’ve unloaded a lot in the last two years, including about a third of my kitchen doodads, extra serving platters, redundant towels, furniture for rooms we no longer have, boxes of books, and all sorts of other things. I’ve made a concerted effort to pare down our pantry, winnow my wardrobe, purge the papers, and downsize the Dickens out of everything. Most people wouldn’t want to move between Thanksgiving and Christmas, especially if they were in our situation, with a 20-hour round-trip drive coming up. There’s the weather. There’s the early sundown. I suspect, though, that if we were trying to move to this neighborhood in spring or summer, we’d never find a house. The market is too competitive. I’m excited because we’ll be able to start the New Year in our new home!!! I will post once a week about our progress as we pack, move, unpack, deep-clean our current house, change our addresses everywhere, and adjust to our new home. |
AuthorI've been working with chronic disorganization, squalor, and hoarding for over 20 years. I'm also a marathon runner who was diagnosed with fibromyalgia and thyroid disease 17 years ago. This website uses marketing and tracking technologies. Opting out of this will opt you out of all cookies, except for those needed to run the website. Note that some products may not work as well without tracking cookies. Opt Out of CookiesArchives
January 2022
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