I come from a long line of procrastinators, and there is no time in my life that this genetic predisposition to delay comes to light more than when I have to move house. When I was a child, I remember the doorbell ringing early on a Sunday morning while we were eating breakfast, and my father said, “Oh, that must be the movers. We probably need to find some boxes.”
During our move from a condo in the city to a farm in the semi-boonies, I thought, with the help of Linnea, I had defeated my destiny. A couple of weeks before we even put our condo on the market we had busted ass to get boxes of stuff we didn’t need for day to day living into storage. We had rearranged furniture, we had cleaned, we even did minor repairs around the house like getting a few holes in walls spackled and the garbage disposal replaced.
We were still unprepared. Despite having many of our worldly possessions in storage, despite having 45 days from accepting the offer to closing, we still were packing some boxes at the last minute. Our move was taking place in a couple of phases, too, which made it worse. We were closing on the sale of our condo on a Thursday and on the purchase of the farm on the following Monday. In between we stayed in an AirBnB.
We had movers to handle all the literal heavy lifting, for which I am eternally grateful. Between two storage units and our condo, they had to use 2 trucks and coordinate both arriving 2 hours away from 2 different origins within a 45 minute window. They managed it, they got the boxes and furniture in the house quickly and efficiently and without any damage – it was exhausting just watching them.
I’m kind of not really kidding about the exhaustion part – my job was to look at the boxes as they brought them in and tell them which room to put them in. Weirdly, a kind of decision fatigue quickly began to set in – there were over 100 boxes, which means that I had to make 100 decisions (albeit trivial ones) within a very short amount of time. By the end of it, I was crabby and nearly bit Linnea’s head off when she asked me what I wanted to do about dinner.
But we did move in, and now we have to begin unpacking…