This move will go down in history. I will start by
explaining The Terrible: moving with
a 34 week pregnant wife in the middle of tax busy season and a husband in the
worst block of med school according to the professors and older students. If
all those don’t say “it’s a great time to move,” then we sure don’t know what
does. We have been planning to move from about week 2 in our original house, so
when the house that our friends from church (the husband is a 3rd
year VCOM student) came available, we jumped on it. It is an area we were
trying to move to from the beginning, is an amazing house (we had been over
several times), and is with our same property management company, so it seemed
like a great idea. Plus, we could move before having a 2 month old—the age
Lottie would be when our lease was up. Because everything in the South moves at
its own pace as you are about to see, our property manager agreed to let us
move with no fee to us at all.
We arranged to get the new house on 2/14 and vacate the old
on 2/23, thinking a 10-day overlap would be helpful given the circumstances I
described above. Carrie was going to fly in on 2/14 to help me paint the
nursery and move my kitchen. In comes The
Horrible: SC got hit by a 3 day snow storm with Spartanburg getting 4
inches. After hours of trying to figure things out, Carrie and I realized there
was no way for her to get here. Besides being horribly disappointed (I have
seen her for 3 hours since November 2012), I was now on my own for the weekend
since Chris had a 2 tests Monday and 1 Tuesday. I managed to paint the nursery
and move the kitchen (and was completely safe doing it—I promise!). We spent
every evening of the following week taking loads over to the new house. We
moved about half the house. The rest we boxed up to be moved along with the
furniture by movers I had hired for Saturday.
Friday afternoon ushered in The No Good: I received a call from Budget saying that the 24 ft
truck I had booked a month ago was not going to be available, so would a 16 ft
truck be ok? Not sure why I was asked if it was ok—if there was no 24 ft truck
physically there for me to pick up, then I guess I have to take the 16 ft truck.
Chris worked his magic and got us a decent discount, but we were still stuck
with a truck half the size we needed.
Saturday morning arrived—our sweet friend Ingrid showed up
to help with last minute things and to allow Chris to head to the school to
study while the movers did their thing. I had also arranged for our wonderful
friend Megan to show up after the house was empty to clean. As 130pm arrives,
so does The Very Bad: No movers show
up. And hour pasts, nothing. I call and am assured they will be there in the
next 30-60 minutes. Nothing. Now Megan shows up with her husband and 3 kids to
help and to clean, except the house is a total chaos of boxes and disassembled
furniture. I call again—another promise that they are 40 minutes away. Again,
nothing. Now, my poor husband gets a call from his super stressed and hormonal
pregnant wife, and he takes over the situation. After many calls and lots of
sitting around doing nothing, the movers arrive at 7pm—5.5 hours late. We sent
everyone home (Megan did all the cleaning she could—bless her heart) and asked
the movers to get everything that Chris could not move himself, knowing that a
second trip was most likely not in the cards. Sure enough, the movers finished
unloading the first trip at 11pm. They managed to get everything except about
30 boxes and our bikes. They did a pretty good job actually. We felt bad for
them since they don’t have anything to do with scheduling. All this meant that
Sunday, we skipped church to finish moving, which Chris pretty much did by
himself. We returned the truck 1.5 hours late (just let them try and charge us
for that) and were completely out of the old place by 1pm—exhausted, achy, and grumpy.
Though we are still not recovered enough to appreciate all
the humor in the situation (the house is in total disarray since we pretty much
had the movers just put boxes anywhere being too exhausted to care), we have
tried to focus on the positives—the weather was AMAZING, we did completely move
out of our old house, and we did not pay full price for anything thanks to
Chris’ firm but polite handling of everything. And even though our house looks
like this
this
and this
it still feels cozier and nicer than the Norwood place.
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