Life Lessons from Moving

Back in June, I wrote about life lessons learned from painting.  Well, we also learned quite a few life lessons from moving recently.  Here are a few:

Life Lesson #1: Start Early
My last day at school was June 12th, and I pretty much started packing then, two weeks before moving.  That said, we were STILL frantically packing things until the last minute.  How in the world was so much stuff in our teeny tiny townhouse?

Where did all this stuff come from?!?

Life Lesson #2: Expect Some Conflict
Jason and I get along really well.  We rarely have any conflict at all, so I was surprised when we had several, um, discussions while packing.  We had very different priorities when it came to moving.  I wanted to pack up boxes and prepare for the move up to three weeks in advance.  He wanted to patch up holes at the old house up to the night before we moved.

We also surprised each other (and maybe ourselves) with the things we wanted to hold onto.  I refused to throw away a $15 MDF storage box that he deemed too "college" to keep.  He balked at my suggestion to throw away (or goodwill) a cordless phone that we found in the guest room.  He thought it was something good to keep (even though we don't have a landline!).

Life Lesson #3: Expect the Unexpected
My husband is a closeted box-collector.  It turns out the majority of our attic was full of empty electronics boxes.  Who knew?

We knew unexpected things would happen on moving day, and we just needed to roll with the punches.  Here's a few of those unexpected things:

1. Our dresser drawers didn't come out of our dressers.  Trust me, we had three engineers and three other people look, and they are definitely screwed in.  Did we freak out?  Nope.  We got extra boxes, and the contents of both our dressers were packed in about 10 minutes.
2. The screws to our bed frame disappeared.  I put them in a labeled ziploc bag in my nightstand along with a bag of screws for my dresser mirror.  We looked all around the old house, checked the other nightstand, and emptied (and inverted) my nightstand to see if they had ended up behind the drawer.  We still to this day don't know what happened to those screws!
3. My dad was abandoned and locked out of the new house.  After the first truckload, the old owner came by to pick up a few remaining possessions.  My dad got to talking to him out in the backyard about ham radio and he said the next thing he knew, everyone had left to go get the second truckload.  No biggie, he'll wait inside.  Oh, except we had locked up the house!  Thank goodness we have a shady yard!



Life Lesson #4: Plan, Plan, Plan 
A week before moving, the weather prediction was 99 degrees.  After groaning and moaning, I took action and bought lots of water, gatorade, and soda, and put some in each fridge (old house fridge and new house fridge).  We also had towels set aside if anyone needed to wipe sweat.  Thank goodness, since it ended up being 105 on moving day, not 99!

Other ways we planned -- we took all our food and clothes over to the new house before moving day.  We knew the trip would be faster those days and that we were more likely to forget these things if we waited until the craziness of moving day.  We also talked about what order we wanted to move things, labeled the boxes with their destination and contents, and labeled all our belongings (especially cleaning and painting supplies) that were supposed to stay at the old house.

All our planning really seemed to pay off.  No one died of heat exhaustion (thank goodness!) and we had all our stuff in the new house (2 truck loads) by 1:00.  Score!


Life Lesson #5: Don't Sweat the Small Stuff
Since I was home during the day (yay summer vacation!), I did that majority of the packing.  I was fine with this, until it came to drinking glasses.  I have no idea why (I had no problem packing breakable dishes), but packing the glasses (especially our four wine glasses) filled me with dread.  After putting it off for weeks, I expressed my anxiety to Jason.  Then Jason told me that the 4-pack of wine glasses had cost him $6.  All this stress over glasses that could be replaced for $6 if they got broken?!?  Ridiculous!  I packed those bad boys up with confidence and went on my merry way!

I'm now a wine-glass-wrapping expert.  Loosely stuff newspaper inside the glass and around the stem.  Wrap in bubble wrap like a burrito and tape it securely.

We did it!  Plus, we learned some life lessons along the way.  Tomorrow, photos from moving day.