Moving accomplished

Last week I wrote the following but couldn't get it online:

November 22, 2014

Well, it’s done. Almost. At least the move over here.

I hate to admit it but moving is exhausting. I was up at 4:30 the last two mornings but I still felt like I was a dog chasing his tail. Now, I am sitting in my recliner with a cup of green tea and feel “rode hard and put away wet”.

Yesterday the moving crew arrived at 8 am and immediately I felt like I was being pushed by a tsunami. They knew exactly what to do, worked very systematically from room to room – until they encountered an obstacle - me.

I had worked very hard to have everything ready but I didn’t manage to have the whole lot packed. My PLAN (the best laid plans of mice and men…) was to purge and pack. Friends, purging takes more time than you think. When you purge, you must also resist the urge – the urge to peek into that long forgotten photo album of your babies when they were just born, or, run through all the old magazines to check which ones you want to keep (don’t even THINK about it—just toss unseen), or, consider if anyone would want that perfectly good whatever. It all takes time, and time I didn’t have anymore.

After about two hours, the boss sent one of the vans over to the new apartment and I had to go with them to show them where everything was supposed to go. After getting that done (did I mention that the driving time each way was at least 30 minutes?!), the boss called and told the guys to come back and pick up the kitchen where I had bought it a month ago. While they were going for the kitchen, I was supposed to wait for the other van and show where things were supposed to go.  The trouble is, I had to go back to my “old” town and pay cash for the kitchen, which meant that I couldn’t be in the new flat. The other guys, now on their way back, had no idea where the kitchen company was. So I raced around until I found the janitor, pressed my keys into his paws and dashed off to Haan. When I got back to my old apartment, nobody was there! 

I dashed up into the flat, found the moving company’s number, called the secretary for the boss’s cell phone number and gave him a ring. He was furious! It turned out that one of my guys had put premium gas into his boss’s diesel van! Catastrophe. To make matters worse, we were supposed to pick up the kitchen before two pm and it was already one pm. I raced over to pay and my card didn’t work. So I bolted off to find a bank. Then the boss called me and asked me to go pick up one of the stranded workers, take him with me to the kitchen place and have him stand guard because the kitchen parts would then be outside of the building (since it was closing at two). Of course there was a traffic jam where I had to pick the guy up.

Finally, a quickly rented van showed up and the guys got the kitchen loaded and were supposed to head straight to the new apartment.

It took them an hour.

The guy who was supposed to install the kitchen had been waiting all afternoon to get started.  Toward late afternoon he finally could begin but left when I did at about 7:30 pm. And that is the way everything ended. No more kitchen helper, no functioning kitchen. Lots of sawdust everywhere. 

I slept in the old apartment since the movers were coming early. There was one bed and one couch in the flat and the messy office. Extremely cozy for my weary self.

This morning, I was up at 4:45 and was madly packing again. I was supposed to completely pack the rest of my office things and I still needed to finish packing things from my old kitchen.

Promptly at 8 the movers appeared. At 8:45, the new owners of my old kitchen appeared to disassemble everything. So now we had real chaos. Two people in the kitchen who kept asking for tools or a ladder, 3 guys grabbing up everything movable and a bossy, smart-alecky chief-of-operations barking orders and chain-smoking. (One time, he shouted at me that he was talking to me. I said “Oh, I didn’t think you were talking to me because I don’t know ANYONE who would be so rude to me”. That shut him up.)

I was so glad to have everyone leave. This whole thing was quite exhausting. And expensive.

It is hardly possible to get into my new office because almost every centimeter is covered with boxes. Even though I labeled the boxes, I find kitchen things in the bedroom and office things in the living room. When in doubt, stick the box in the office was their motto. So the heavy boxes reached the ceiling!! Now how am I supposed to get them down?!

So that’s where I am. Tired and drowning in stuff. If I’d done this move two years ago when I began this downsizing project, I would have ended up in the madhouse!!

So I’ll keep on with the quest. As I slowly move into retirement the next couple of years, I’ll not need the special books and seminar equipment anymore. So I need to keep on selling and recycling. Never give up!