Category Archives: Moving

About the Best Laid Plans

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Photo by Colin Lloyd on Unsplash

This last Tuesday was moving day for my son Simon. The night before we stayed up late packing up all the dregs of his life for the past couple years where he has been living so that he could move into a new place. The heavy lifters were coming, the truck and trailer were available and the crockpot of hot dogs that would be the reward at the end of the day were waiting in the fridge to get plugged in in the morning.

And then, the snow came.

No, let me re-phrase that: the blizzard swept in and laid waste to all of our best-laid plans.

When I woke up that morning and looked out the window, my first thought was: YUCK. The second thought was: I wonder if Simon would be okay with me ditching him today? (Well, not really, but I certainly wasn’t excited about moving in a snowstorm.)

And then the voice of reason kicked in via a flurry of texts from my husband Rick, Simon’s concerned dad, who was already on the slow road to work that morning. Basically, the message was: Abort! Abort! And, so to speak, we did. At least, we scrapped Plan A. The heavy lifters were relieved to be relieved and instead, Simon and I made several slow trips with my car to go pick up the keys, meet with the internet guy and move the most important things that could fit in the car: the bed (thank you, IKEA for facilitating take-apart beds), the television and, of course, the crock-pot of hot dogs.

If you think about it, things rarely go According to Plan. As I look back, I’m almost surprised at where life has tossed me. Sometimes, I’ve nailed the 3-point landing, other times I’ve completely muffed it. Usually the messes happen when I resist the change of plans, whether I just decide to ignore the weather and carry-on indiscriminately or if I choose a less-than-sunny disposition.

Not that it’s easy to always put on a happy face. Simon and his girlfriend/new-roommate were sorely disappointed first thing in the morning when they realized that things would not be progressing the way we had all hoped. But at the end of the day, while eating our hot dog supper, the smiles abounded because everyone arrived after all, in the good and proper time. And I was happy to leave them to set up house and home and make a plan for my next day.

Which would most likely change when I got there.

About House Hunters International

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Photo by Robin Ooode on Unsplash

So, not to put too fine of a point on it but we’re in Month Twenty of this global pandemic thing, at least, since our world here in Canada became strapped down, wings clipped, house arrested. While it doesn’t really substitute for the real thing, I have been watching House Hunters International with insatiable interest these days. And the question on my mind is: Where in the world do I really want to go? You know, when the viral cloud begins to lift a little?

I don’t really have any patience for the shenanigans on the regular House Hunters franchise where (ahem) CRAZY AMERICANS looking for a new home come armed with 1. Unreasonable Expectations 2. Unfettered Attachments to Barbeques and 3. Unbelievable Demands for Separate Bedrooms for their Pets. The ensuing problem of living in a place like, say, Texas, is that you expect everything to be BIG: big house, big kitchen, big backyard. The only thing that people don’t usually come with is a big budget. Hmmmm. How is this going to work exactly if everything on the list is non-negotiable?

Sometimes on House Hunters International, because the move comes with a cost of living allowance, the budget IS big. On an episode I watched recently, the folks “settled” for a 3-bedroom, 2-bath apartment in Zurich – to the tune of $7100 a month! Yowza! More often re-locators are working with a big wish list and a small budget, like on the domestic version, but cultural differences can really change that must-have list fast. In Europe or Asia, for instance, things we often take for granted are not a given, things like bathtubs, ovens and clothes dryers. I can understand that in a country where square footage comes at a premium, space-suckers like bathtubs aren’t a thing. And ovens aren’t necessary when you can go out to eat in the market for cheap. But I’ve been to Asia and it’s humid there. It takes days for clothing hanging around the house to dry. I don’t know why clothes dryers aren’t more of a thing. But it’s not my country or continent, so what do I know?

The thing about travelling is that it’s a chance to experience things that are different. Why would we get such a hankering to go to the other side of world if the view is the same? And why would I want to expect the same things as I find at home – staying home would be cheaper, non?

But moving someplace else is a whole different ballgame. Home, for some, is the repose when all else is different: city, workplace, grocery store, cafe, greenspace. So I can understand wanting it to be dependable and consistent. I think that’s why so many of us in this last twenty months have indulged in home renovations and HGTV – because HOME helps us to find our place in the larger world, gives us a place of courage to start our day and a place of rest to end it.

And hopefully is filled, at least sometimes, maybe just even virtually, with other people that you love. Home really can be Sweet Home.

About Minimalism

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I watched the Netflix show The Minimalists: Less is Now this last week. Minimalism is pretty hot these days which is interesting since the recycling of Amazon cardboard boxes is also trending. Minimalists like Joshua Fields Millburn and Ryan Nicodemus of theminimalists.com or Joshua Becker of becomingminimalist.com tout that they have all had the experience of ditching most of their accumulated “stuff” and then reaping that inverse proportion – maybe even more – of happiness, contentment and meaning.

Hmm, sounds familiar, sort of: “Give, and it will be given to you. Good measure, pressed down, shaken together, running over, will be put into your lap. For with the measure you use it will be measured back to you.” Oh yeah, that was Jesus, one of the original minimalists. Well, okay then.

I actually love this message which is why I continue to watch such Netflix shows about minimalism and purging (the good kind, a la Marie Kondo). On the flip side, I enjoyed an unhealthy fascination with hoarding shows when they first became popular, but mostly for the after pictures that are shown in the last five minutes of the show. I love me a good makeover, especially if it’s just about scaling down the room or the hair or the makeup so you can see the real foundation of what is actually there, which is probably pretty darn good.

Ah, but there’s the mystery. Who are you really underneath it all? And what do you really want your rooms to look like? Along with digging through stacks of newspapers and storage bins, the proponents of minimalism say you have face up to who you are and where you want to be – both figuratively and literally. For some, it may result in selling it all and moving into a motorhome to go find the answer.

Again, Jesus: “If you want to be complete, go, sell your possessions and give to the poor, and you will have treasure in heaven. Then come, follow Me.” This is where the heebie-jeebies set in: sell ALL my possessions? THEN I can follow Jesus? Or find zen? Or 42, The Answer to Life, the Universe and Everything?

Well, no. But yes. If what is keeping you from happy is stuff, then logic follows that the stuff needs to go. Of course, physically getting rid of the excess is the “easiest” way to free yourself. But there is also a metaphysical component to freeing yourself. Sometimes it means getting in a car and going on a road-trip with a suitcase full of comfy clothes and hiking shoes to find out what it is that you really miss. (Chances are it’s people.) (But not dusting or looking for your keys.) (And maybe it’s the road.)

I’ve had my own aha-moments with minimalism, first precipitated by so many moves. Pack outdated university textbooks and boxes of old magazines more than once and you soon realize that you need to SCALE IT DOWN – or suffer a hernia. And then there was the time we got ourselves in a bind mortgage-wise and downsized from an acreage to a teeny-tiny bungalow. When we stood the couches on end just to get them into our new house, we pretty quickly realized that a bunch of it had to go. Fast. Before a falling couch wrecked one of our kids.

But those were good lessons because we found out two things: One, we didn’t need a lot of that stuff. And Two, we didn’t even like a lot of that stuff. The binary choice of this couch or that one made it easy to see what we liked because we couldn’t have it all. And sometimes it resulted in deciding we like neither couch and that we needed to save up to buy a new one that suited us better. And the surprise of all surprises, for both Rick and I was that while we still valued a few Things, we found out we really valued Space. Which really is Nothing. Talk about minimalism!

I’m not getting rid of everything, because frankly, it hurts for me to sit cross-legged on the floor all the time. But I keep working at having LESS because LESS is MORE. At least in my books. And in the minimalists’. And Jesus’. So there.

About Me and Books

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There’s a lot of talk about minimalism and tiny houses these days. Generally, I figure that most people who choose to live in a tiny house probably don’t have much stuff to begin with. Or they’re just not that materialistic. They’re outdoorsy, probably, and live in warm climates. They entertain only small parties, if any, because they only own 2 plates and 2 forks and one knife. And they seem to have a romantic idea about sleeping on plywood beds in treehouse style loft bedrooms conducive to hitting your head if you suddenly sit up.

I’ve watched a few of those shows and frankly, it just looks too much like camping to me. Tiny bathrooms where you can sit on the toilet to shower (not a high-value efficiency for me), steps that hide dog dishes (because tiny house people always have room for the largest dogs), shoe storage that doubles as art installations – all these things look nice – in theory. For reals, I’d like to see the stats on how long before these tiny house owners put their digs up for sale on Kijiji.

Maybe the only ones that pique my interest are the tiny-house-book-lovers. You know, people who basically build themselves a self-sufficient closet to hold all their best friends – er, favorite books. Books as art installations? That I understand.

However, as a bookishly nerdy person whose favorite activities all center around words, I don’t have as many books as you might think. Oh sure, I have plenty, more than the average book-bear probably. But I actually don’t have a problem with getting rid of books if – IF – they no longer serve me.

I think my purging prowess started when we moved for the fourth time in the first seven years of being married and I lifted a box heavy with university textbooks that had not been unpacked from the previous move. What purpose did it serve me to save my Microbiology textbook from my ill-fated first year of nursing school? When would I need to urgently look up how a virus evolves the life span of a paramecium? And given constant scientific research and updating, how could I ever know if my textbook would stay “right”? And finally, I never really read it in the first place. Microbiology, Biology, Zoology – all the science-y textbooks – are long gone. And I never missed them.

I started my theory of decluttering before the internet became a THING – when copious amounts of unreliable information were available on the Google – in mere seconds. Way back then, my first criterion for letting go of a book was: Can I find this at the library? Oh, sure, it’s nice to have something around sometime just because you like a subject. Case in point: I never did let go of my Art History textbook from 1988 and I still look things up in it. Because I’m interested in art, especially old art, for which there’s not a lot of new research being dug up, archaeologically speaking. And, in my opinion, an art history textbook makes a nicer coffee table book than Physics, a textbook I also never read but which additionally gives me the heebie-jeebies.

This brings up my second criterion, which was to honestly ask myself: will I ever actually read this – again or for the first time? When I first started homeschooling my boys, I supplemented our bookshelves by haunting garage sales and second-hand stores. I bought anything and everything that looked educational, classic or fun. The result was bookshelves overflowing with many, many unread books. While it served us well to have lots to choose from, I was again confronted with this problem when staging a house to sell. Rather than box up the bulk and shove it under the stairs, I purged again – this time, asking myself the hard questions like: Will I ever read The Count of Monte Cristo or Mein Kampf or HTML for Dummies? Yeah, no.

But that’s me. Physics and HTML might be your perfect bookshelf fodder. And maybe at one time, it was for me, too. On a podcast that I listened to this morning about this subject, the guest talked about letting go of the things that are “no longer you” – which is sometimes hard to do. But she also said that she trusted herself to remember what was important. The result is a lot more room in your brain to focus on what’s here and now. And maybe a lot more room on your bookshelves.

These days, I try to “preview” books before I ever buy them – meaning I use the library again, a lot. There’s nothing worse than spending $30 on a book that you open up and say, “Oh no.” Of course, COVID-19 has made using the library a little different (hurry up, Phase Two!) but in the meantime, I’m shopping my own shelves for reading material. Because I still have books I have to read. And plenty more to give away.

About Packing and Unpacking

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An eerie depiction by artist Michael Johansson

So, in case I haven’t mentioned it already, we moved recently. Which means we are still in the throes of unpacking. And unpacking after the initial excitement has worn off is annoying. It’s like a game of Monopoly where you want to sabotage yourself and lose all your money to get out except people keep landing on your properties and paying you. And they’re paying you in unpacked boxes.

Moving, though somewhat of a monumental task, was facilitated by the adrenaline of the deadline. The packing, the cancelling and setting up of services, the praying for good weather in the middle of January – it’s all rather time-sensitive, so it gets done.

The packing has its own rhythm. A few weeks in advance, it’s like playing Jenga with your household items. It’s easy at first: I packed those things that were superfluous to everyday life or, at least, to my everyday January life. I easily boxed up things like fondue pots, swimsuits, CDs, weigh scales, Halloween decorations and our flip-flop collection.

The closer you get to the actual moving date, the trickier/Jenga-er it gets. Who knows what kind of cooking utensils you need to leave till the last minute? Or just how many clothes you will need for that first week because you won’t have the energy to unpack the rest of your clothes for at least another week? (Or two.) Or which books you need to leave out in case of a reading emergency? One false move and the whole thing comes crashing down as you find yourself rooting in ALL of your packed boxes for Post-It notes and leftover chocolate from Christmas. (Just kidding, there is no such thing as leftover chocolate.)

The day before moving, no matter your intentions of packing like items together for a seamless transition later, you start firing all manner of things into overly-large boxes whose weight will inspire colorful curse words, tying pillows and utensils and shampoo bottles up in bedsheets, and shoving furniture screws and such into your jeans pockets, confident you will remember where everything goes/went when you get to the new house.

You won’t.

Once all your worldly goods are finally at your new destination, the game changes to Tetris. Especially in the case of downsizing. It’s simple in the beginning because you start with the big stuff: for the most part, the table goes in the dining room, the beds go in the bedrooms, the desk goes in the office. Well, hypothetically the desk goes in the office. My desk, my overly-large-teenage-elephant-desk, went into the garage. Because when I bought it, I never envisioned the proper size necessary to fit into a tiny bedroom/office. Oh, the short-sightedness of empty-nesters! Silver lining: it classes up the garage.

But I digress. After the large pieces are in place, the game of Tetris starts coming at you faster and faster as you unpack your boxes and figure out what goes where. Our new kitchen easily has room for the forks and knives, a reasonable number of dishes, the toaster and the coffee maker. (Or even, the three coffeemakers. Because: coffee.)

Once the kitchen was unpacked, the linen closet filled and the bathrooms organized, I was pleased with the minimalist look our house exuded. THIS was before I started opening all the boxes of books and knickknacks. And extra kitchen stuff. And extra books and knickknacks. The clue that we have too much stuff: in the few short weeks since I packed some things, I lost all recollection of even owning them. Like, hypothetically: if a garbage bag full of, let’s say, Precious Moments statuettes accidentally was thrown away, I would be none the wiser. (This didn’t happen. I got rid of those several moves ago.)

I will continue with this game of Tetris because even though empty counters are easy to clean and restful for the eyes, the house doesn’t look like it’s been lived in yet. And I can’t get rid of things like my mom’s Royal Purple mug, the ornate jewelry box my Baba gave me for graduation, the birthday cards my daughter-in-law drew for me, the framed pictures of my boys in all their stages of growing up. I might work hard at being organized and clutter-free, but the “messes” that humans make in my home are still welcome, those messes that bear witness to life lived and not just displayed.

And besides, I wanna know what’s still in all those unpacked boxes.

About Moving Margaret

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So, we moved a couple weekends ago. And while the new house has quickly taken shape, Rick and I are bent out of it. As I regaled all our many former moves in my last post, I honestly thought I was ready for this one.

I wasn’t.

It’s not that we didn’t have everything packed. It’s wasn’t that I wasn’t ready to feed our hard-working crew on Saturday – I got up early to start the crockpot of hot dogs that is part of our moving tradition. (Because, as I told my sister-in-law, we have moved enough to have a moving tradition.) It’s just that we didn’t factor in that we are older and therefore the recovery from moving a mere 6 blocks west was going to take a couple chiropractors, massage therapists and a lot of time.

Another hazard of getting older: moving beyond the typical IKEA cardboard furniture. This genre of house furnishings remains popular despite the wordless and sometimes fruitless instructions that accompany its assembly. It’s cheap(ish) and usually light and therefore, easy to move. But what we noticed this time is that alas! we had invested in some actual wood furniture since the last move. And wood can be, well, heavy.

And then, there was the piano. The move to our former house eleven and a half years ago pretty much also marks the beginning of our three boys’ musical careers. We already had purchased a keyboard in 2007 when the Radio Shack here in town – a.k.a. L&K Television – shut down. Piano lessons with the amazing Luis Guarnica started soon after in September and by December, he had them playing Christmas carols.

And then some friends were moving away to a temporary location and asked: Would we store their piano for them? Storing: meaning in our living room where three young men could plink away on it daily. It was a win-win situation. Until they wanted their piano back.

And so, it was back to the Radio Shack special.

That year, at music festival, the astute adjudicator, after listening to the boys play their pieces, commended their efforts but then called out to the crowd, wanting her remark to land on my ears: “Mom, these boys need a real piano.”

It was our luck that my ears weren’t the only listeners. A lady from our church heard this message as well. And so it was that a few nights later, we got a phone call from Bill, who summoned us to visit him in the hospital. Would we, he asked, be interested in “hanging on” to his late wife’s piano for awhile? And so “Margaret” – named for her former owner – came live at our house.

Just say the words “move a piano” and you can quickly clear a room. Pianos are just heavy. And awkward. And big. It usually requires a lot of muscle, followed by a lot of pizza afterwards. Margaret signified the end of the move as it was the last thing to go a couple weekends ago, when she went to live with two of the boys in their home in Edmonton. After all, Rick and I only know how to play the radio – it made much more sense for the piano to be where the music makers live.

And so our rural piano moved to the big city, took a trip up an elevator and hopefully will live there for at least another eleven and a half years. Which should be enough time for all of us to forget how hard it is to move a dang piano. Even one with a disarming name like Margaret.

About That Time We Moved (Which Time?)

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People say that we move a lot.

I guess if you consider that Rick and I have lived in 7 different homes since we got married over 27 years ago, mayyyyybeeee that’s a lot? Two of those places we lived in for less than a year. The house we are moving from this weekend has had our longest run: 11 and a half years. But those moves that happened so close together? Family members whose muscle we call upon to help – they still think we move too much.

I was recently explaining this to a friend and said that really, they weren’t all our fault. And then when I started recounting the houses to her, I realized: it’s all our fault. Really. We could have stayed put more after we initially moved from Edmonton out of our honeymoon apartment that didn’t allow kids. (But then we had a kid. Our fault.)

The first house that we rented when we moved to Vermilion we “showed” to a retired lady from our church who wanted to move to town to be closer to her husband in the nursing home and couldn’t find anything suitable. We solved that problem for her. We thought our house was pretty nice and, alas, so did she. Our fault.

That was one of the less-than-a-year houses. The next one – our first house purchase – was a little less than five years. But then we started to get ideas about living on an acreage and we moved. Oops, our fault.

We lived on “Coyote Acres” for over 5 years – the second-longest stint. And it was a wonderful place to raise three little boys where they could play and explore outdoors, where we had our one-and-only-ever dog, where we started reading the Harry Potter books out loud together as a family and where Daddy built the coolest ever basement fort for the boys. But then we realized we couldn’t afford the acreage anymore and we traded houses with someone back in town, seriously downsizing ourselves and circling the wagons. But pretty much our fault.

The next house was another short stint: only ten months. We put some sweat equity into the house and liked it so much, we decided to sell it. By this time we had the fixer-upper bug, so we found a deal of a house to move to. The deal being it needed a lot of work and we considered entering one of those ugliest-kitchen-in-Canada contests. But the buying and selling and fixing? Our choice, our fault.

At the three year mark, we moved again. It wasn’t our fault that our best friends in Vermilion were moving overseas and needed to sell their house. We were just helping, right?

It’s been a pretty great house, this one that we’re about to leave. It’s was big enough to accommodate our extended family gatherings – including 3 graduation parties and one wedding for our kids, plus lots of Christmases. It was a great landing spot for all the teenage friends the kids brought home. And we loved the location: on the provincial park that you could get out and enjoy in less than a minute or just open up the blinds and enjoy the view.

But then it got too big. It’s not our fault the kids moved away. (Is it?) It’s not that we stopped liking our house – on the contrary, we fixed it so much to suit us that we liked it more and more each year. Is “too big” a good enough reason to move? Maybe. Probably. It’s kinda our fault we didn’t realize that our house would someday outgrow us.

And so we are moving again. Although I am one of those weird people who actually likes packing and unpacking, it’s a bit stressful as we get close to the actual moving day – did we do everything we needed to do? Where can we find another 30 boxes? Did I pack the packing tape? Where are we gonna sleep tonight? But the adventure of going someplace new, setting up new routines, figuring out where everything goes and what we can get rid of – I (and I think, Rick, too) like that challenge. It’s our fault. And that’s okay.