Some Home Truths About Moving Homes

After packing and unpacking at least 7.5 million boxes (at least it seems like it), MarathonMum is back at the blog.

For the record, Mr. MarathonMum and I are pretty good at moving. In our 10 years of marriage, this is the fifth residence we've been in (working out to a new place once every two years). But despite our skills in knowing how to pack china so it doesn't get broken, giving away copious amounts of items to the local charity shop in an effort to streamline operations, and knowing that we ought to keep the bottle opener in a safe place so we can have a cold one at the end of the first day, problems still emerge.

Unfortunately for us, this time it was the bottle opener we couldn't find. So the first night we got beer in cans, the second night we used a screwdriver, and by the third day, I thought it wasn't worth the stress so I went out and bought a new one. As soon as I got home, went to look in a box for something else and guess what I found? The bottle opener, of course! (Now we have two).

Three weeks later, we're still unpacking. Given the strains of the sale, we decided we weren't going to kill ourselves to get everything unpacked immediately. It didn't help, though, that two different friends stopped by soon after we moved in and commented that when they moved, they had everything unpacked and organized within a day. I repeated this, with some distress, to my friend's mother who looked at me and said, "Sounds like they need to get a life!" I felt much better after that.

Now on to my Home Truths About Moving Homes:

1. Inevitably, you will end up hating the buyer of your old home. The person might actually be a wanker-idiot and you have no choice but to detest him (as was our case) or they might be perfectly nice, but you'll still feel a certain amount of hostility toward them. This time, our wanker-idiot walked into the flat at 11 a.m. in the middle of the move and asked when we'd be done. "At 1:30, like it says in the contract," I told him. "Really, it says that?" he asked. "I thought I could move in at any time today." Anybody who's bought or sold a house, or even watched a T.V. program on the process, knows that 1:30 p.m. is the standard time in this country for gaining possession. As we were down a man in the crew, when 1:30 came and we realized we weren't nearly done, I made the boys a round a tea. Our wanker-idiot had to watch them drink it from his comfortable perch on the sidewalk.

2. Something will get lost. Despite the best efforts to be organized and keep things in order, something crucial will get misplaced. This time, it was half of the pegs needed to assemble our 14-year-old Ikea bookshelves. I finally found them after a very intensive search involving many boxes and several hours.

3. Olympic years are a good time to move. We bought our first house together in 1996, and I packed boxes while watching the women's gymnastics final in the Summer Olympics. We moved in 1998, but it was 10 months after the Winter Olympics (it still counts, in my mind). In 2000, we moved into our flat just a month before the Summer Olympics in Sydney. And finally, this year, we moved a few weeks after the conclusion of the Winter Olympics.

4. Learn to embrace chaos. It's part of the fun.

5. Cold beer is critical to the success of the move. Make sure you can find the bottle opener.