June 29, 2009
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Moving
I hate moving.
I don't mean the type that involves limbs or wheels, as in the basic changing of position. I enjoy walking, waving my arms, rolling around. Rather, I hate the kind of moving that involves boxing up all your crap and somehow shipping it somewhere else.
If you're fairly settled into a place, and are only moving to a new apartment or house within the same city, things can be relatively simple. There are friends who can help, pickup trucks you can borrow, and only short distances to contend with. You don't necessarily have to box things up nearly as thoroughly, and as long as you have access to the new place beforehand you can even spread the process over a period of days or weeks. Total cost can be as little as gas and pizza.
The move I'm looking at, however, is the across-the-country variety. Several thousand kilometers separate my wife and I from our destination. Our primary obstacle is currently that it's proving very difficult to find an apartment where we're going. The rental market there is extremely tight, and we're not good at putting up with dumpish digs since we spend the majority of our time at home. Once that pesky little detail is dealt with, we'll need to figure out how we plan to get our worldly possessions almost 4000 clicks down the highway. The quotes we're getting back so far are all in the range of 6 weeks' salary, which is waaaaay outside our financial means. We've resigned ourselves to leaving the majority here, but a lot still needs to come with us.
Some people can live in a spartan manner. Not in the Battle of Thermopylae sense, but in the way they can avoid accumulating material goods. My wife and I, on the other hand, have a great ability to fill our living space with stuff. In addition to furniture, there just ends up being all kinds of things that we don't want to part with. If you're amassed a collection of, say. hard-to-find books, how can you leave them behind? And what does one do about the myriad objects with sentimental attachment? Even setting aside all these issues, there's still the not-insignificant task of fitting it all into boxes.
Part of me would like to be the guy on the commercial, who flies with an empty suitcase and a Mastercard. But the reality is that I'm both attached to my stuff, and too poor to replace it if I have to leave it behind. If I don't ship my bookshelves, CDs, bed, freezer, etc, I'll have to buy new ones, and I can't afford that. And with garage sales landing perhaps 5 cents on the dollar, we can't monetize what we don't take.
Anyhow, just needed to vent, I guess. I know it'll all work out somehow. I just with I could throw money at the problem and make it go away. "Hey, moving company? Please come to my house, pack my stuff, and lug it to the following address. Here's my credit card". Sigh.
Take care
-J-
Comments (2)
That's tough. Decluttering and purging is constant for me.
Where are you heading to take your education degree?
I'm available for any questions you might have.
Hi Justin.
Long time, no interact on xanga!
I don't envy you for what you are going through. It is definately a big move and alot to do in the process of it all, that's for sure. But breaking it down into smaller more managable phases does tend to help in the grand scheme of things, and that sounds like what you are doing anyway.
When it came time for me to move my things from Perth to Adelaide. I actually did it by what they call here a "back load". I don't know if they have the same thing in Canada. But it's where a furniture removal truck takes a full load of people's furniture from one city to another city, and when they come back they don't necessarily want to drive back with an empty truck load. They'd like to make a bit of money on it.. as in .. something rather than nothing. So, they invite people to book their furniture and things on this "back load" at a cheaper price, sometimes a considerably cheaper price, and that's what I did. I just looked in the yellow pages and phoned around the different companies that I saw and told them what furniture I had to take and they gave me a quote.
I also negotiated with different companies and played them off each other and got further reductions too, as in told company 'A' that company 'B' could give it to me for a lesser price. Another thing I did was, if they quoted a particular price to me then I would actually say to some of them that I didn't quite have that particular amount that they were asking but I did have 'X' amount (which was a hundred and fifty under the actual price) to work with and they accepted it.
So, I'm not sure if they do have "backloads" in Canada with furniture removal companies, or even if you have tried it. But I hope it helps. Feel free to ask me anything more about it if you need to.
Goodluck with everything.
Take care,
Michelle
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