Like I said a couple weeks back when I told you all that we officially bought a place: just because the actual house hunt is over doesn’t mean this column is going to drift off into the ether. I have insights refined through countless moves that must be shared with you.
How many moves? When we pack our boxes and ship off to Casa de Kyte in early July, it will be the 25th different address I’ve had in my 37 years of existence.
That’s an average of just less than a year-and-a-half at each stop, a rate that is created when you bounce around between five addresses in four years and change during university, hit up three spots in under two years living in St. John’s and have a couple brief, ill-advised “we’re living together” situations during your single years.
Moving around that much has taught me many valuable lessons, like think long and hard about where you want to live when you move off campus after first year and don’t move in with the girl who hasn’t gotten the key back from her last boyfriend. Most importantly, however, it has taught me that uttering the words “Ah, we’ve got four months before we move” is a critical mistake.
I don’t know if you know this, but it’s February 22. Yeah. I know – Christmas feels like it was just yesterday and there is no way that it has already been seven weeks since your made your New Year’s Resolutions. How are those going by the way? Yeah, me too.
Two months of the year have gone by in the blink of an eye and that means the four months between now and the day the moving truck (or your buddy’s pick-up) pulls into the driveway are going to race by as well. Knowing that, you have to be diligent in doing as much advanced planning and whittling down of your possessions as possible because the last thing you want to do when you’re moving into a new place is scramble around to pack everything at the 11th hour and tote a bunch of crap you no longer need/use to your new digs.
Trust me on this.
Listen – I get the whole sentimentality thing. My office is littered with knick-knacks, Funko Pop! Figures and vestiges of a past life, many of which have accompanied from one coast to the other and back a few hundred kilometres towards The Interior, but even more of them have been shipped off and sent out to the massive Value Village on Store Street in Victoria or simply move to Storage Area G.
More important than getting rid of the stuff you don’t need, however, is advanced planning for Moving Day because even though it is coming, life does not care and isn’t going to slow down between now and the 72 hours before you shuffle off to another address.
Our advanced planning for this upcoming move started when we were moving from Victoria to our current temporary address in Aldergrove.
We clean out closets of all the clothes we hadn’t worn in more than a year. We put the stuff we knew we were going to use over the next year into Rubbermaid bins that could be stacked up and stored away. We packed up all the stuff that normally hangs around the house gathering dust and left it in boxes when we arrived here because what’s the point of unpacking something we’re not going to use when we’re just going to have to pack it again in 8-12 months?
Instead of having eight dinner settings, we’ve been rocking four. Rather than having a wide array of coffee mugs available for that morning jolt of caffeinated goodness, there are six and one of those is solely for Sarah’s mom who thinks our over-sized coffee mugs are ridiculous and requires a much more civilized sized mug. It’s the same reason we have four stem-less wine glasses and one with a stem in the cupboard right now.
This move is going to be a piece of cake (mmm… cake) because by the time it rolls around, we’ll have been planning it out for more than a year.
And that’s the biggest piece of advice I can give you on this front: if you’re moving, start planning and preparing now because trying to scurry through it in the final 48 hours torture. The mix of excitement and trepidation can be overwhelming, but it can be curtailed if everything is almost entirely done before those last two days roll around. Plus, you don’t want to be the jerks that leave your old place looking like a complete sty, so you need the final 12-16 hours before you actually decamp for your next destination to clean your current domicile. Seriously. Don’t leave your old place looking like a rat’s nest.
So start planning and making little inroads into your massive piles of “To Be Moved” materials now.
You’ll thank yourself (and me) later.
