Moving Daze: Part 2

Previously on Went From Being Married To Single:

All moves into houses start with one significant event: the closing…

So, if all of this is required to get the loan and I want the loan, why can’t I just sign in one place and give me the damn keys, already?

Even with everything going on, I’ll take the girls when I can…

... the bed of my truck sticks over a foot out from the garage opening …

As exciting as it was to have a new place to call my own, I would trade it all in to go back to the life my wife and I once shared... 

Regardless of whatever I was feeling at the time, I still had moving to do.  With the girls in tow, I was able to get one load over to the new house on Friday night.  This was mostly the items that went into the garage: tools, various boxes filled with junk I may never actually look at again, and more tools. 

My original plan was to rent a U-Haul on Friday night, start loading it until I could load no more, go to bed, wake up early on Saturday morning and continue to load until it was full or all of my stuff was in there, whichever came first.  Unfortunately, U-Haul had other plans.  The place I called and reserved my 14’ truck said “No problem!” but U-Haul Inc. called Friday afternoon to inform me, “Problem!”  There weren’t any trucks to rent at that time from that place.  “What times and places do you have?”  I asked, a bit perturbed I even had to ask.  Several options should have been ready to go. The only thing they could find was an office 20 miles away from my new house that had a truck that was only 10’ long without a loading ramp and I could only pick it up at 2 pm on Saturday for four hours.  That wasn’t going to work so I went with Plan B…once I figured out what that was.

Actually Plan B was what I did when I was single:  I loaded up my truck as high as I could and moved the stuff myself, taking several trips instead of just one.  Kind of fit, didn’t it?  I was single and thus I return back to the ways of the single man…well, almost.  I still had movers coming to get the big stuff on the following Monday.  I wasn’t that single. 

I decided to take the plan change in stride and made the most of it.  Saturday morning, while the girls watched TV waiting for their mom to pick them up, I loaded up my truck, covered up my possessions with a tarp because it looked like rain and bungee corded the hell out of it.  I mentioned in Packing It In that I wasn’t sure if the money I spent on bubble wrap was worth it.  Well, the $7.00 I spent on a new set of multi-length bungee cords was totally worth it.  Not only were they useful in keeping my stuff from flying out of my truck and along the roadways of Northeast Pennsylvania, they were also handy with my hand-truck in securing the heavier and bulkier items to it so I could move them around more easily.  “Nothing like a good set of bungee cords,” I will now be saying to my children every chance I get.

The truck was loaded but no Ex in sight, so I started to dismantle my office.  It was the only room I hadn’t done a whole lot of packing in since I work from home and I needed most everything in there.  My desk has a matching printer stand and a two drawer file cabinet and both of these have hutches with glass paned cabinets on the top.  I really like them but the hutches won’t make it into the new house.  The office there is one the previous owners built above the garage.  It’s basically a long, “A” shaped room.  It’s going to be a cool place to work but to use the hutches in there would mean putting the printer stand and file cabinet in the middle of the room since the walls start to pitch inward about 30 inches from the floor.  While I’m all for adventurous furniture placement (and who isn’t??), that didn’t seem too practical.

Anyway, once the Ex arrived and I said goodbye to the girls, I ran my truckload over to the new house. I decided to unpack what I unloaded immediately after I unloaded it.  In the past, I would have brought each load over, stacked it up in the garage and then went back for the next load.  Once everything was at the new place, I would then spend the next 14 months unpacking it.  Not this time. With the exception of stuff I was storing in the basement, I put each box in the room it should be in and then unpacked whatever was practical for me to unpack.  This mainly meant the kitchen which, let’s face it, is the most unpacking intensive room in the house.

I was faced with a quandary at this point: how to organize the kitchen.  Since my new house is quite a bit smaller than my old house, I don’t have certain amenities like a pantry so I needed to use cabinet space for my non-refrigerated food supplies. This meant a strategic storing of my dishes, pots and pans and plastic ware. Quickly, I devised a schematic that would incorporate proper storage and the ergonomically sound “kitchen work triangle.”  The schematic was perfect, the execution, not so much.  I think I ended up with the ergonomically un-sound “kitchen work trapezoid” but that’s okay.  I got everything as organized as I could.

That Saturday, I was able to make two big truckload trips, got several boxes unpacked and cleaned up the old house.  In the late afternoon, I was laying on the floor in my new master bedroom, sweating and exhausted from the frantic pace of moving.  I was contemplating a nap when…the doorbell rang.

I was about to meet my new next door neighbor.

Next time: I meet my new next door neighbor.