It felt good to sleep in our own bed, even if it didn’t have sheets and we just put blankets on it. At least it was soft and comfortable. I got up and went to the old house and started the cleaning process. It’s grueling. Going around on hands and knees and picking up the infinity of pen caps, safety pins, Barbie doll shoes, thumb tacks, pennies, paper clips that seem to have been cemented behind and under things by tremendous quantities of dust.
I realized that our new high-tech cyclonic vacuum cleaner has a whole lot of catch points along its hose that seem to bite down on anything that’s any rougher than a ball bearing, thus bunging up the works and causing 6-inch columns of solidly packed-in dust. On the other hand, I got to know my vacuum cleaner intimately in this process.
I got home and
pirateguillermo had been a busy little bee himself, unpacking and making decisions about the eventual home of our stuff. Packing is easy – everything goes into a box. Unpacking is so difficult because nothing already has a home and you have to look at each individual thing and make a decision. Most of my decisions are starting to involve the trash.
I realized why I was so unprepared for the move. My expectations of the capacity of a box and the actuality are far different. For instance: I believe that I should be able to put the entire contents of my dresser into a single box. After all, I can quite capably pack for a two-week vacation in a single suitcase, so why not one box? The reality is that it took something like four boxes for just my dresser. Four. This is why it took hundreds of boxes to pack my house, rather than the 50 or so that I was thinking it should take.
We went up to the road to check out our mailbox and came to the realization that the people that had lived there before us had taken it. There were the neighbors mailboxes, nailed to their posts. And a giant hole where ours would have been, had the prior tenant not ripped it clean out of the ground with the cement it was anchored in. Bastard.
I realized that our new high-tech cyclonic vacuum cleaner has a whole lot of catch points along its hose that seem to bite down on anything that’s any rougher than a ball bearing, thus bunging up the works and causing 6-inch columns of solidly packed-in dust. On the other hand, I got to know my vacuum cleaner intimately in this process.
I got home and
pirateguillermo had been a busy little bee himself, unpacking and making decisions about the eventual home of our stuff. Packing is easy – everything goes into a box. Unpacking is so difficult because nothing already has a home and you have to look at each individual thing and make a decision. Most of my decisions are starting to involve the trash. I realized why I was so unprepared for the move. My expectations of the capacity of a box and the actuality are far different. For instance: I believe that I should be able to put the entire contents of my dresser into a single box. After all, I can quite capably pack for a two-week vacation in a single suitcase, so why not one box? The reality is that it took something like four boxes for just my dresser. Four. This is why it took hundreds of boxes to pack my house, rather than the 50 or so that I was thinking it should take.
We went up to the road to check out our mailbox and came to the realization that the people that had lived there before us had taken it. There were the neighbors mailboxes, nailed to their posts. And a giant hole where ours would have been, had the prior tenant not ripped it clean out of the ground with the cement it was anchored in. Bastard.
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Not that you're likely to bother collecting, but I thought you would want to know that.
By the way: moving always takes more boxes for me, too. Moving a dresser, incidentally, takes very few: each drawer gets taken out and moved, full, so I don't have to pack them.
You see, though, this is where my world is very, very sad. Because they DID just move the drawers with the stuff in them. But not the cabinets above the drawers, or the mountains of stuff carefully stacked on top of those cabinets. Let me just say that I am a genius of storage, and that the average house has 4,000% more storage capacity than most people are getting out of it.
My grandma had a theory about unpacking, at least for the kitchen - leave everything in the box. When you are cooking and you need something, you will instinctively reach for a cupboard or drawer. That's where you put that thing (once you find it in the box). Easier if there's only one person cooking/unpacking, though!