A Disjointed Post Recalling Moving Horror Stories In My Past
So we move on Valentine`s Day. We booked a crew for packing the day before, but I`m going to try to do a lot of it ourselves - hopefully when they show up, there will be little left for them to do, but just in case anything happens, we`re covered.
I got the estimate for the full-service job, and it was about what I expected (...gulp!...), but I think we can make it a lot cheaper if we move some of our junk ourselves this weekend, since we have a minivan and we`re moving only a mile away.
Thanks to everyone who had moving company recomendations -- we decided to go with Delancey Street. One of the moms at school who moved five times in five years raved about them.
I am simply not going to tell Hub that it`s a rehab organization. Personally, I think that aspect is a plus: I will know our movers are NOT taking drugs, and have sworn to live the straight and narrow. And I`m really hoping they send Gavin Newsom to pack our boxes, since they`re the ones doing our hot mayor`s rehab. (Oh.......is it still okay for me to be attracted to him, even now that we know he screwed his best friend`s wife? As Leah Garchek quoted someone in her column the other day, "Who wouldn't want to bed Gavin? Even my dog wants to hump his leg." )
Hub was not home the day the San Francisco movers unloaded our stuff from the container from Japan, so he didn`t have to deal with The Crazy Mover.
Imagine this scene from July, 2005:
Crash! went something in the kitchen, but by the time I got there, there was no broken dish to be found. There were three missing when I counted later. They were very cheap dishes, so it wasn`t worth filing a claim, but it really pissed me off.
I thought at first The Crazy Mover just had a problem understanding English, so I asked one of the other three movers to translate into Spanish for me.
"No, he does understand -- he`s just, you know...." and he lowered his voice to an emphatic whisper, "....CRAZY!"
The other three movers were very apologetic about The Crazy Mover, no doubt worried that his craziness would affect their own tips. At the end of the day, I gave all the tip money to the head guy, and I really hope he didn`t share it with The Crazy Mover, but the whole matter was out of my hands.
The Crazy Mover unpacked my dishes and stacked them in the sink -- which was FULL OF WATER at the time. I guess I would have washed all of them, anyway, after his crazy fingers touched them, but on the very top he set a large Japanese platter that was carefully packed in a cardboard box with little cranes on it....and of course the wetness of the dishes underneath seeped into the cardboard, and the red dye ran into the sink water and made a HUGE MESS.
"What are you DOING?!?" I asked him, and he looked blankly back at me with eyes empty of all understanding.
"Unpack," he said. "I unpack. You no want unpack?"
The other three movers gently led me away from The Crazy Mover.
"Sorry, lady -- we`ll try to keep an eye on him."
The Crazy Mover unpacked the kitchen and the boys` room. The latter ended up being a giant mound of toys, clothes and shoes that went halfway to the ceiling. I felt faint everytime I opened the door, so I had to keep it closed for a few days and do the rest of the house first.
Hub got home from work that day and found me weeping as I cleaned up the mess in the kitchen. He vowed we would never try to save money on moving again, since he really can`t stand to see me cry.
"Next time, we`re using the full service Japanese company!" he vowed, and I didn`t remind him that although they cost about 50% more than the American company, I still cried when they moved us to Tokyo from Los Angeles.
I cried for a completely different reason that time. They did all the packing, and not a thing broke, but.....they packed only like three items in each box.
"Otherwise, the boxes will be too heavy for us to lift," they explained. Indeed, they were very little guys.
But since it was an international move, we were being charged not just by weight, but by volume, too, and I`m sure those half-empty boxes cost us plenty of extra yen, and the thought of wasting all that money made me just as miserable.
I keep telling myself that local moves are so much better than international moves. Since 1985, I`ve moved my stuff across the Pacific ten times.
The first time, I went to Kyoto for my junior year in college, with two suitcases and a carry-on bag. A year later, I went back with the same, but mailed three or four boxes of things I`d acquired.
Then I moved back to Tokyo after I graduated from college in 1987. I got set up in a temporary apartment and bought a few things like a futon and kitchen stuff -- and then got hired by a company that wanted to send me to their Palo Alto, Calif. offce for three months` training. So I had to store my new stuff with friends in Tokyo, and move my basic things to Palo Alto, and then back to Tokyo.
I stayed in my first apartment in Tokyo for almost three years, and then moved to New York for a year, for graduate school. I sublet my apartment, but once again I stored stuff with friends all over Tokyo.
Hub and I got married over my grad school spring break, so that when I moved back in the summer, we could move into his employee family housing. It was a grim project in the dreary Tokyo suburbs (near Sakura-josui, on the Keio line), built in the early 1960`s when Japan was still a developing country. It had no hot water tap in the bathroom sink, and I remember how freezing it was to wash my face in the winter. Okay, okay, that has nothing to do wth moving -- I`m just remembering how much less comfortable our life was, when we were first married.
Then we moved to Los Angeles for four and a half years, and moved back to Tokyo with two preschoolers and all the baby stuff. That was a pretty rough move. Yeah, that was bad.
We were in the same apartment in Tokyo for six years, and moved when we bought a place of our own. It was less than a mile away, but we didn`t have a car so we couldn`t do it all ourselves, and had to get a domestic moving company.
The last move from Tokyo was definitely the hardest move of my life. The kids didn`t want to leave their school and their friends, I didn`t want to leave my great job and my friends, and no one wanted to leave our new apartment we had bought literally weeks before we found out we had to move.
And then when we finally got here, I thought it was going to be so wonderful right from the start to live in San Francisco -- but The Crazy Mover was the harbinger of a really awful year of adjustment and homesickness. I honestly didn`t expect our adjustment to be as bad as it was -- in fact, I`m only realizing in retrospect how hard it was, since things finally got better.
Okay....enough disjointed blogging. I am now going to take all of our pictures off the walls and then duct-tape the picture hooks to the back of the frames, to make rehanging them easier.
Moving.... I hate it, but I have to admit -- I`m really good at it.
I got the estimate for the full-service job, and it was about what I expected (...gulp!...), but I think we can make it a lot cheaper if we move some of our junk ourselves this weekend, since we have a minivan and we`re moving only a mile away.
Thanks to everyone who had moving company recomendations -- we decided to go with Delancey Street. One of the moms at school who moved five times in five years raved about them.
I am simply not going to tell Hub that it`s a rehab organization. Personally, I think that aspect is a plus: I will know our movers are NOT taking drugs, and have sworn to live the straight and narrow. And I`m really hoping they send Gavin Newsom to pack our boxes, since they`re the ones doing our hot mayor`s rehab. (Oh.......is it still okay for me to be attracted to him, even now that we know he screwed his best friend`s wife? As Leah Garchek quoted someone in her column the other day, "Who wouldn't want to bed Gavin? Even my dog wants to hump his leg." )
Hub was not home the day the San Francisco movers unloaded our stuff from the container from Japan, so he didn`t have to deal with The Crazy Mover.
Imagine this scene from July, 2005:
Crash! went something in the kitchen, but by the time I got there, there was no broken dish to be found. There were three missing when I counted later. They were very cheap dishes, so it wasn`t worth filing a claim, but it really pissed me off.
I thought at first The Crazy Mover just had a problem understanding English, so I asked one of the other three movers to translate into Spanish for me.
"No, he does understand -- he`s just, you know...." and he lowered his voice to an emphatic whisper, "....CRAZY!"
The other three movers were very apologetic about The Crazy Mover, no doubt worried that his craziness would affect their own tips. At the end of the day, I gave all the tip money to the head guy, and I really hope he didn`t share it with The Crazy Mover, but the whole matter was out of my hands.
The Crazy Mover unpacked my dishes and stacked them in the sink -- which was FULL OF WATER at the time. I guess I would have washed all of them, anyway, after his crazy fingers touched them, but on the very top he set a large Japanese platter that was carefully packed in a cardboard box with little cranes on it....and of course the wetness of the dishes underneath seeped into the cardboard, and the red dye ran into the sink water and made a HUGE MESS.
"What are you DOING?!?" I asked him, and he looked blankly back at me with eyes empty of all understanding.
"Unpack," he said. "I unpack. You no want unpack?"
The other three movers gently led me away from The Crazy Mover.
"Sorry, lady -- we`ll try to keep an eye on him."
The Crazy Mover unpacked the kitchen and the boys` room. The latter ended up being a giant mound of toys, clothes and shoes that went halfway to the ceiling. I felt faint everytime I opened the door, so I had to keep it closed for a few days and do the rest of the house first.
Hub got home from work that day and found me weeping as I cleaned up the mess in the kitchen. He vowed we would never try to save money on moving again, since he really can`t stand to see me cry.
"Next time, we`re using the full service Japanese company!" he vowed, and I didn`t remind him that although they cost about 50% more than the American company, I still cried when they moved us to Tokyo from Los Angeles.
I cried for a completely different reason that time. They did all the packing, and not a thing broke, but.....they packed only like three items in each box.
"Otherwise, the boxes will be too heavy for us to lift," they explained. Indeed, they were very little guys.
But since it was an international move, we were being charged not just by weight, but by volume, too, and I`m sure those half-empty boxes cost us plenty of extra yen, and the thought of wasting all that money made me just as miserable.
I keep telling myself that local moves are so much better than international moves. Since 1985, I`ve moved my stuff across the Pacific ten times.
The first time, I went to Kyoto for my junior year in college, with two suitcases and a carry-on bag. A year later, I went back with the same, but mailed three or four boxes of things I`d acquired.
Then I moved back to Tokyo after I graduated from college in 1987. I got set up in a temporary apartment and bought a few things like a futon and kitchen stuff -- and then got hired by a company that wanted to send me to their Palo Alto, Calif. offce for three months` training. So I had to store my new stuff with friends in Tokyo, and move my basic things to Palo Alto, and then back to Tokyo.
I stayed in my first apartment in Tokyo for almost three years, and then moved to New York for a year, for graduate school. I sublet my apartment, but once again I stored stuff with friends all over Tokyo.
Hub and I got married over my grad school spring break, so that when I moved back in the summer, we could move into his employee family housing. It was a grim project in the dreary Tokyo suburbs (near Sakura-josui, on the Keio line), built in the early 1960`s when Japan was still a developing country. It had no hot water tap in the bathroom sink, and I remember how freezing it was to wash my face in the winter. Okay, okay, that has nothing to do wth moving -- I`m just remembering how much less comfortable our life was, when we were first married.
Then we moved to Los Angeles for four and a half years, and moved back to Tokyo with two preschoolers and all the baby stuff. That was a pretty rough move. Yeah, that was bad.
We were in the same apartment in Tokyo for six years, and moved when we bought a place of our own. It was less than a mile away, but we didn`t have a car so we couldn`t do it all ourselves, and had to get a domestic moving company.
The last move from Tokyo was definitely the hardest move of my life. The kids didn`t want to leave their school and their friends, I didn`t want to leave my great job and my friends, and no one wanted to leave our new apartment we had bought literally weeks before we found out we had to move.
And then when we finally got here, I thought it was going to be so wonderful right from the start to live in San Francisco -- but The Crazy Mover was the harbinger of a really awful year of adjustment and homesickness. I honestly didn`t expect our adjustment to be as bad as it was -- in fact, I`m only realizing in retrospect how hard it was, since things finally got better.
Okay....enough disjointed blogging. I am now going to take all of our pictures off the walls and then duct-tape the picture hooks to the back of the frames, to make rehanging them easier.
Moving.... I hate it, but I have to admit -- I`m really good at it.
posted by L. at 12:06 PM
8 Comments:
I moved six times in the four years of my undergraduate career, and then just to keep things interesting, another three times over the next three years. I moved six months ago. I'll probably move in another six when my lease is up.
I hate moving, I don't care how good I get at it. Good luck--in my experience there is one truly awful thing about each move that makes it uniquely hideous...I hope it's nothing TOO terrible (like if the other guinea pigs croaked, how bad could THAT really be?). XOX
I may have mentioned this before, but your last move - and the stress and homesickness involved - sounds a lot like when my family moved back to the States from Hong Kong. It was my parents' decision - kind of - but we basically moved back into the house they owned, which had been trashed by renters while we were gone, and spent the summer fixing it up to sell. My dad went off to some Executive MBA program at Harvard in September, and I went off to college, and my mom was left with a seriously angsting 13 year old boy and a five year old girl, and by Christmas NO ONE was talking to anyone else.
We don't talk about that year much anymore.
Well that was a mouthful. That would be cool if Gavin showed up. Hey, we're human right? I hope you don't have any crazy movers...or maybe I do cuz it's makes for a more interesting read ;)
at one time my family moved at least once a year.
my mother hated it, I loved it (because I sat around watching her fret)
but just thought it was really sweet that you mentioned that "Hub" hates seeing you cry.
Yep that's impressive. Moving in a week that is unbelieve-able... is there some sort of time compression in the blogville??
Trying again to post.
I'd forgotten about Delancey. Good choice.
In one of my first moves by movers I was cleaning the oven when they came to pack and they packed the grungy brush and brillo pad I was using.
Hoping you move goes smoothly.
Oh man! those are some stories! I just hope that every time you moved your belongings were sent to the right country.
When we were coming from Iowa to Sweden, the sweet girl at the local United Van Lines affiliate didn't quite know the difference between Sweden and Suriname, and our stuff ended up in South America. She later said she picked a wrong country from a drop down menu on her computer screen. We finally got our stuff 4 months later, but it was no fun to start winter in the arctic with no warm clothes.
Well, the good thing was that the move ended up costing us only about 500 bucks after all the refunds and complaints. And nothing was broken or stolen!
Post a Comment
<< Home