There are probably one or two of our friends who haven’t yet heard about our move. It certainly wasn’t one of the best either of us has ever had. It started with the wrong truck.
When I called Budget to reserve a truck, I told the woman on the phone that we had a 2 bedroom apartment. She seemed confident that a 10′ truck would be just the thing for us.
As the boxes (and boxes and boxes and boxes) of our stuff started to pile up, I called Budget to confirm that a 10′ truck would really be enough to handle all our stuff. The woman I spoke to on the phone didn’t want to discuss size estimates; she only stated that they had already rented all their trucks for the weekend we were moving. So I was stuck.
The day of the move (Saturday, 27 March) all our possessions (including 23 boxes of books) was collected in the center of the living room. Unfortunately, we hadn’t managed to convince any of our friends to come down to Jersey City to help us move. So it was all up to us. Or me, as it turned out. Anna started the morning in a very cranky mood which only got better. I was fairly optimistic that we would be able to fit everything into the truck, although it would be an extremely close fit.
The day is largely a blur; but all I can recall is the similarity to a 3D version of Tetris — a game I’ve never mastered. Around 4 PM (we started at Noon) I realised there was no way we’d be able to fit the mattress and box spring (Where did that name come from? There are no springs in a box spring.) or all the stuff that seemed to have materialised out of nowhere. Specifically the filing cabinets and several dozen more boxes which seem to have been hiding in the second bedroom.
Eventually we called it quits around 7 PM.
The next morning, I awoke bright and early to begin unloading the truck. Our friends Gretchen & Owen were to arrive at 11 AM and I wanted to have everything unpacked and waiting on the sidewalk to maximise their time. Un-tetrissing the truck took about an hour.
I tried to keep track of the number of boxes during the unpacking process; but I seem to have lost count around 80 boxes. 80 boxes. With 23 boxes labelled books. There’s no telling how many other boxes Anna hid books in without labelling them.
Of course, there was also some furniture.
I left the dressers in the truck because they were too much for me to move by myself. When Owen & Gretchen arrived, we set out to heft the furniture starting with the monster couch. Once Owen and I had moved all the furniture, we formed a box brigade to speed up getting all the boxes into the house. 45 minutes after they arrived, everything from the truck was in the house.
Of course, we still had another van load of junk down in Jersey City including the mattresses, a four-drawer filing cabinet (to compliment the 2 drawer), and other assorted stuff. But that could wait for Wednesday.
I’ve put my foot down: when next we move, we will not have so much stuff.
Anna’s already making good progress, when she unpacked the boxes of books, she discovered that nearly 2 boxes worth of books had never been read and many of the books were no longer worth keeping. We’ve donated 3 boxes of books to the local library so far…