Recently, my wife and I - together with our daughter, and my sister - were able to successfully navigate the unnecessarily complex and expensive process of purchasing a townhouse. The fact that it took three adults, all working stable full-time jobs, plus a not insignificant inheritance from the estate of a deceased relative, as well as secondary inheritance from a non-deceased family member to accomplish this feat really speaks volumes about the process today. Housing prices in Vancouver (well, most North American cities really) are complete and utter bullshit. But that’s another topic, which could easily be its own rambling angry rant of a blog post. For Crystal and I (and by proxy our kid) moving out of the oversize shoe box we previously called home has been absolutely life changing.
Moving… moving sucked. We spent nearly 10 years in our shoe box tucked among shoe boxes. 10 years accumulating stuff, and finding creative ways to <del>hide</del> store said stuff. Needless to say, when the time came to move, we discovered we had a lot more stuff than we thought we did. Turns out we were so good at <del>hiding</del> storing it, we didn’t even know how much stuff we had.
Pictured: the contents of our apartment, moving day, CE
U-Haul provides a handy guide, which is meant to help inform people what sort of goods and services they’ll require to move a home of a certain size. For a one-bedroom apartment like ours was, they estimated a mid-sized moving truck, and 2 sets of moving boxes (1 set each of small and medium boxes, about 20 per set) would suffice. We went through 4 sets of moving boxes, about 3 dozen liquor store boxes (we had a lot of beer), and a surprisingly large number of Rubbermaid containers, just to pack up our stuff. Since we were moving my sister’s one-bedroom basement suite on the same day, we decided to get the largest moving truck U-Haul offers. Not so fun fact: it was not large enough. Thankfully, we have friends. Friends whom if we had been without would have made moving a seemingly insurmountable task. To say that we owe them a debt of thanks is a gross understatement, but luckily they accepted payment in pizza and beer in exchange for back pain and the use of the trunks of their cars.
Unpacking is a whole other load of complete and utter bullshit. Building furniture, arranging furniture, discovering that some furniture doesn’t fit where you thought it would, then buying more furniture and building and arranging it… unpacking is just about as exhausting as packing. Plus we made the incredibly wise decision to host a surprise party for my dad’s 60th birthday exactly 2 weeks after moving in, so unpacking was beset with a hard deadline. Deadlines, as everyone knows, never result in an increase in stress or anxiety.
But it’s over now. The move is done, unpacking is (mostly) finished. Gone is our tiny apartment, with its tiny living room, minuscule bathroom, the closet we lovingly referred to as a laundry room. Gone is the little space that boldly claimed to be a patio, the other closet that was brilliantly leveraged into its role as a pantry, gone is the loft bed upon which we spent the past 3 years uncomfortably trying to sleep. Those are all someone else’s tiny accoutrement now.
I’m sure that eventually I’ll get used to the fact that we have our own bedroom again, but right now I'm just enjoying sleeping on a proper bed for the first time in years. Settling in can come later.