May 04, 2011

The Joys of Moving

The past couple weeks have been a little crazy for us. We have taken finals, had family staying at our house, gone to graduations, and moved. Our time has been filled with very good and worthwhile things, but it seems like everything in the world was happening all at once, which made it a little stressful.

I forget how crazy moving is. The year that we first got married I moved four times, and it seems to just get harder and harder each time. I feel like the longer I live, the more stuff I acquire, and the more things I have to worry about.

It boggles my mind how much stuff you actually have in your house. I would look around our apartment before we started packing and think, “There’s not that much stuff in this room. Only a few books, a book case, and a couple desks.” What I failed to realize is that the “few books” I had ended up filling about seven boxes. Not to mention all the decorations on the walls and shelves, the garbage cans, and rugs. Oh yeah, and you have to pack up all your pots and pans, your towels, extra sheets, games, tvs, pillows, your shower curtain, your cleaning supplies, that odd shaped basket you love but can’t figure out where to put it, and tons of other random things.

It seemed like we moved out the majority of our stuff within a couple of hours. On Saturday we moved out all of our furniture, the seven boxes of books, our big bins of Christmas and Halloween decorations, and some boxes of food storage. When we were putting it all in the trucks to take it away I looked around and saw how empty it looked. Everything else just seemed like small things that wouldn’t take that long to get packed up. I was definitely wrong though. It took us part of the next three days to finish it all.

After doing this, I decided that each item takes about the same amount of time to get ready and packed away so items that are large and have a greater volume are much more satisfying to move. We moved out a greater volume of things on Saturday, but a lower quantity. Thus, it was the 2,000 tiny things that took up most of our time.

After the big items were gone and I was packing up smaller boxes, I tried to keep similar things together. This worked for a while, but then somehow, the last fifth of our boxes ended up just being miscellaneous items that didn’t seem to fit into any category. After a while I just started putting things in boxes without worrying what they were because it didn’t seem to make sense labeling everything as miscellaneous.

This move has been a bit different for us because we weren’t just moving things from one apartment to another, we were moving some things into a storage unit, some things to my parents house, and some things we are taking with use to Oregon. It seems easier when you know everything is going to the same place, but we had to be pretty meticulous to make sure that it all got to the right destination.

It is sad to pack all your worldly possessions into boxes just so they can sit in a dirty storage unit for four months. It is all for a good purpose though. We are really excited to be able to go to Oregon for the summer. We hope that we will both be able to find good jobs so we can save money, but the thing we are most excited for is to just be doing something different. It will be a great change from the non-stop drudgery of school. We are looking forward to not having homework and being able to see each other on a daily basis. It has been sad to leave everything and everyone behind for a while, but we hope that we will have experiences and adventures that will make it all worthwhile.

2 comments:

Jeff said...

We just went through the whole moving process ourselves. Since we are renting out our old house and our basement renters won't be moving in until June we still haven't moved everything out of the basement.

I'm excited to hear about all your adventures in Oregon and we'll totally have to have you guys over for some good times in our new house when you get back.

Mt.Pleasant said...

I miss you already.