What I will do differently in a next move
Friday to Saturday I didn't sleep, because I was nervous about the move. Saturday to Sunday I was already asleep by a quarter past nine, because I was exhausted. And today I woke up in my new house, with a view of the meadow and sunrise and even though we still have a hundred years of work to do, I stood like a happy fool at the back of my garden with a cup of coffee. Only I always think about what I want to do differently with a move when I'm already in the process of moving. Really inconvenient.
1. To begin with. May, I’ll just announce it: next time I move, I’m taking at least two weeks off (by the way, I plan to stay here for a while). You have to pack, you have to move, you have to unpack, you have to recover and then settling in only starts a bit. We rushed through the new house this weekend like a couple of kamikaze pilots to get it into some sort of acceptable state and now I'm back at the editorial office, because: that had to work. Not handy, because my head is at home among the unpacked boxes and my newly furnished kitchen. I advised Lil to take two weeks off for her move, which she thought was very unnecessary at the time but did anyway, and which turned out to be very useful in hindsight, and now I still wonder why I never follow my own advice.
2. If you are going to live in a house where the situation is as follows: we are not going to start full-scale renovations right away, but when we do start, the floor has to be first. Do that floor before you move. It’s always worse than it seems. Correction: my floor is worse than it seems and that means we will have to shuffle all the boxes around the house again in two weeks to lay a floor.
3. Buy more moving boxes than I think I need. Everything seemed to fit in the boxes until I suddenly came across a full laundry basket, a full cutlery drawer, and an extensive assortment of garden decorations the night before my move.
4. Not having back pain. I have a hernia, he hurt his back last week, thank goodness we still had some friends in the phone book from whom we could borrow moving/renovation help. Otherwise, we would have been totally in trouble.
5. Storing unpacked boxes. On Thursday, I unpacked, taped, and repacked about twenty-five old boxes from the storage room. Storing for too long means your boxes collapse and if something can stand in storage for two years, do you really still need it? Way too many questions during your move.
6. So finally: declutter even more. Linda de Mol made a whole magazine about it this month, which is just a week too late for me, because I could have really used those tips before I started packing.
