Yeah, it’s all upside down. At this point in my life I’m supposed to be down-sizing, consolidating and simplifying. But after years in an apartment, due to circumstances beyond my control, the opportunity arose to buy a house, so we did. And my wife, 3 daughters and myself moved.
Oddly, the move brought about an odd inconsistency; how had we managed to fit all the stuff that now fills our home in our old 4 room apartment? For now, I’ll just write it off to some warp in the time/space continuum.
Hiring the movers was pretty straight forward, we got a couple of recommendations for a company and gave them a call. They sent over their moving expert to come to the apartment to analyze our possessions and give us an estimate. Very sporting of them. Only, what we needed was an expert to look at where we were going and point out the stuff that we had there that wasn’t going to fit where we would be. See, here’s the thing, items which we fit into our apartment were too big for the house. Think about that a second. Furniture that we had delivered and placed inside our side door apartment was too big to be maneuvered up or down the staircase in a house. A large, 2 story house. A modular couch, for instance. A couch that actually is made up of smaller parts. Some of those parts wouldn’t go downstairs. Our queen size bed? Sure, they could bent and fold the mattress to get it upstairs, but the movers informed us that there was no expletive way the box spring was going to fit. Oddly, they actually used the word “expletive.”
Now, the job foreman was a man who was “looking for solutions and not problems.” He was figuring they could climb up on their truck (oh, it was raining. Did I mention it was raining on moving day?), hand up the box spring to the top of the truck and pass it through an odd feature the house has (as do all the houses in this old building tract) a small balcony with a narrow door off the bedroom. Near where all the electrical lines run into the house. Not wanting to have anyone actually die on our first day in our new home, we declined the offer and discovered our bedding representative sold split queen-size box springs they could deliver the next day.
The toll so far; one abandoned box spring, two abandoned couch sections, one abandoned refrigerator and a couple of air conditioning units that would no longer fit in the new windows we had installed. A few more moves like this and we’ll be sitting around on beach chairs.
Yes, the move was a big deal, exciting, sad, overwhelming. And the memories will last us a long time. Not to mention the unpacked boxes still lurking in the basement.
