Riding on 2-Wheelers with Boxes

My friend Jon Powell, who has recently moved with his lovely wife and two precocious kids back to her home country of South Korea, recently regaled us with the story of their experience packing to move. This made me want to share OUR family’s story of packing and moving – although we’ve live in the same house for 28 years!

In 1978, when we moved in, it was a typical house in our neighborhood – a wood frame house about 972 square feet. But we’ve built on, twice now, for kids’ and grandkid’s sakes. In 1990, we added onto the back of the house so that the 3-bedroom, 1-bath home was now 4-bedroom, a dining room, and 2 baths.

In 2003, we added on a second time. This time we added two 16 x 24 (approx.) rooms – a study and a guest/sewing room, and a ¾ bath.

Well, we were all set to move things into the new area after construction when we found termites in the “old” part of the house. The original 1930s house had a crawlspace, but the 1990 add-on was on a slab. Without a crawlspace, the exterminators had to work “from the top.” This meant that we had to get EVERYTHING out of the 1990 addition. So we packed and stacked and moved everything into the newest (2003) part of the house.

Then, after the termite treatment, we had to unpack everything and replace it into the 1990 part of the house (leaving some stuff still boxed, natch, since it was destined to end up back in the newest part).

Then after the 2003 add-on was empty, we could concentrate on putting furniture, etc into it as we had originally planned.

So our glorious move-in was delayed by $3000 and a month of back-and-forth shuttling.

However, these present tribulations are not worthy to be compared with the glory to come! Or even with the glory of having all the books out of the attic and on honest-to-gosh bookshelves!