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I’ve been lucky, other than the cats hating me for a couple weeks, all my moves have gone well. Crosses fingers against the next move.
Melody wrote:does anyone have a moving horror story?
When I moved to Texas from England, it cost me $3,000 to have all my books and record albums and accumulated kipple shipped over. It took me 10 hours to get here by aeroplane, but it took months for my possessions to arrive by boat, by which time, of course, I’d grown astoundingly happy to live in a duplex that had only the bare minimum of stuff. A mattress, four chairs and a table, Linda’s computer (with 128K of memory), and her tape deck along with a couple of tapes I’d had the foresight to bring with me. The only luxury item we had was a second-hand dishwasher that we saved up for. I don’t even remember a television.
On the day that everything showed up I was quite depressed. Not least because, after much noise parking his 18-wheeler such that it blocked the road in both directions, the first thing the driver asked when I opened the door was “Where’s your fork-lift truck?” When I told him we didn’t have one, he cursed soundly, ostensibly not at me but at the stupid dispatcher who sent him to do a residential delivery of a 1,000 cubic foot shipping crate. Him, who has it in his contract that he absolutely doesn’t do residential deliveries.
We broke the shipping crate open, and I and the neighbours managed to get all the tea chests and loose stuff out, off the truck, and onto the grass verge so the driver could get back to his commercial deliveries and free up our residential road to through traffic.
A thousand cubic feet of junk doesn’t sound like much. You could fit it into a small bedroom, provided the door opened outwards. But spread throughout a house it’s a lot of boxes taking up an awful lot of floor space, and for months I was reluctant to open any of the boxes, and thereby be forced into re-establishing my stupid old cluttered-up life.
A year later, though, I was working as a temporary laborer helping to re-fit a store in a mall, and they were throwing away hundreds of feet of perfectly good 10″ wide plastic coated chipboard (Formica). I retrieved it, took it home, and lined the walls with bookshelves.
It was at that point, after opening all the boxes, that I discovered to my horror that the moving company had run out of room in the crate and simply discarded the box containing all the paperback first editions of two of my two favourite authors.
With my bad memory, and the appalling fact that they had opened about a quarter of my carefully packed and labeled cardboard boxes of books in order to discard the box after pouring the contents into the gaps in the tea crates, I couldn’t tell if that was the ONLY one missing. Indeed, over the past twenty years I’ve keep remembering all kinds of books and things I once had, but can’t actually remember getting rid of. I could probably fill another thousand cubic foot crate with these “missing” items.
There are times that I’ve wished they’d saved me all the anguish by simply losing everything and letting me claim on the astronomical insurance value. All that money, and all that space freed up in my life and mind, would have done me a world of good.
My friend Jeff helped me move twice. I didn’t want him to help me move the second time because the first time some things got broken. He swore to me that he would be more careful and wouldn’t break anything the second time.
Well, I went to get the U-Haul truck and when I got back to the house, he comes running out of the house and hugs me, saying, “I love you. I love you,” in a cute little voice. I said, “What did you do?!” It turns out that he and another friend were bringing my headboard down the stairs and they hit the light fixture in the ceiling of the dining room, breaking one of the glass globes on it and taking out a chunk of my headboard in the process.
My headboard still bears the wound, but the light fixture survived. There was an extra globe for it in the basement, so we just replaced it before we left. I have never let him forget about that though. Fortunately I haven’t had to move again since then! 😆
I had one of my OLD pioneer floor speakers get a hold punched into it (the 8 inch woofer) because who ever packed the crate put them in with the dinning room chairs…
It was an easy fix but I was still upset about it.
When we moved back we made sure that it would NOT happen again, and it didn’t. I took my baby pegasus on the plane with me since at the time it was the only Windstone that I owned. 😛
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