On the Road to a New Life, Part 1

About two weeks ago, we bought several bulk bundles of boxes, a few hundred feet of bubble wrap, and assorted packing materials from our local Minneapolis U-Line distributor.  We spent those two weeks packing.  This was a substantial step up from the last time we moved – that packing process started about two days before we were supposed to move and ended about two days afterward.

This time, we thought, we’ll be proactive.  We’re moving across the country (hiring professional movers and everything!), so we should do things right.  Virtually everything small we owned was in a box of some sort.  Anything larger (like our bookcases, although they were disassembled), we left out.  Apparently, that was an incorrect course of action.  When the movers arrived, they came in, looked at our pile of stuff, and sighed.

I didn’t take that to be a good sign, and it wasn’t.  Evidently – and I wish someone, such as, for example, the moving company, had told us this – movers can only take objects wrapped in blankets and packing tape or packed in a corrugated cardboard box.  So the movers set to wrapping every single object we owned in blankets and miles of packing tape.  At one point, I even drove to the Container Store to buy extra boxes into which we could put the smaller non-cardboard boxes.  The movers arrived around 6PM (they described this as “in the afternoon”) and left at 5:30AM.  Oh yes – they spent nearly 12 hours packing our one-bedroom apartment into their truck.  Admittedly, we have quite a bit of stuff.  But 12 hours?  We moved nearly the same amount ourselves in a U-Haul to this apartment two years ago in less than 5 hours.

And it cost us too.  The $1800 estimate we were given was of course based on too little information – an extra $800 in space from the estimate was needed, plus $600 in extra packing materials (including nearly $100 in packing tape!).  We ended up with around a $3000 bill for moving, which I think is a little steep.

The scheduling also put a dent in our plans.  Originally, we assumed the movers would be arriving around 2PM Saturday and spend maybe 6-7 hours loading.  After they left, we were planning to clean the apartment, set up the inflatable bed for our last night, and have a nice relaxing transition to our 24 hours worth of driving.  We had even made an appointment for Comcast to come between 8 and 10AM to pick up their equipment, and we told our landlady that we’d be out by 10.

At 6AM, I went to sleep for a nice 5-hour nap while my wife started cleaning (as one of us needed to be rested in order to drive the 8 hours later that day).  At 11AM, I woke to find my wife still cleaning, although she’d called our landlady to delay our move-out until 1PM and had napped next to me for an hour (although I didn’t notice it happen).  Comcast still hadn’t arrived.  I ran the excess 60 lbs. of clothes that we weren’t taking with us to Goodwill and got back to help with the final cleaning and loading the car.  Our landlady knocks at the door at 1:15PM with her carpet cleaner and basically shoved us out the door.  She promised she’d deliver the Comcast box to the company.  And I don’t think we’ll be getting our security deposit back.

So finally, we are able to pack the car in earnest.  That would be fine except that we never had time to test-load the car and have way too much stuff.  Add that to the fact that we decided to buy a N2N 36″ soft-sided pet crate for our cat to live in during the trip.  Now, this crate is pretty awesome, but it is huge.  It takes up about 75% of the back seat, and I can’t see out the back window.  On the bright side, the cat’s litter box, food, bed, and a cardboard piece for scratching all fit in it simultaneously.  The cat has even taken to standing on top of the litter box inside the crate.  Which is really amusing when we take a corner a little too fast.

As I think I mentioned before, our stuff is being held by the movers for about a month while we install new flooring, new paint, and new drywall in our new house in Virginia Beach.  So we needed to pack enough items to live for a month in our little Saturn sedan, which came down to an inflatable queen bed, clothes, tools, assorted pots and pans, and the cat.  It’s stuffed.  When I open the trunk, various bags literally pop out.

But it does fit.  We stuff everything in, fed the cat some diazepam, and set off.  That’s when the meowing started.  Apparently, preventing the cat from feeling anxiety enables him to express anger instead.  Fortunately, we found the secret to stopping the meowing – my wife let the cat out of his gigantic crate and simply let him sleep in her lap.  Problem solved.

As I told my wife earlier today, I consider this first day of the move not my first act as a new professor but my final act as a graduate student (even though my defense was several weeks ago, the school officially graduates people at the end of the month – in this case, 5/31).  This of course means that if it had gone smoothly and as expected, it just wouldn’t have felt right.

So now, 30 hours into this adventure, we are in Bloomington, IL at an Extended Stay America.  And surprisingly enough, in terms of the overall trip, we are on time.  I can only hope that tomorrow will be a little smoother…