To be honest I never used to believe those surveys which ranked "moving house" in the Top 10 most stressful experiences in life. Packing up and lugging around furniture! How could that be only slightly less traumatic than divorce or even bereavement?!
I have already moved house 15 times to date and although stressful, it was manageable, as I was either a kid and it was all fun and games or an adult who had never actually moved with furniture, just personal belongings. Nº16 was the one that brought these survey results to life! You would have thought that moving just across the road was a walk in the park, I did at least, until we got started. We were literally moving into another urbanisation across the road having sold our property and we didn’t think of hiring a removal company instead we decided to hire a large van and a couple of pairs of hands and just get on with it. We were moving from a ground floor house to a top floor apartment and having checked the measurements etc of the largest objects, we were convinced all items should fit in the lift. How wrong we were!!!!
So all was planned to get going on Saturday morning, very early, as everthing had to be out that weekend as the new owners were moving in the following week. My wife had already spent the previous week packing up boxes and so on and I had spent hours just throwing out junk, it is mind boggling how much crap you just store up in you house over the years, thinking it may come in handy or “just in case”. Well, I took an adamant decision that I was finally going to rid myself of all this unnecessary “stock”, close my eyes and start throwing it out or giving it away to the needy. Shirts, shoes, jumpers, magazines, bits and pieces, basically I said anything I hadn’t used in the past year would go out, when I realised that was most of my belongings, I quickly changed the rule to the past two years, “just in case”! And on I went making piles and piles of stuff which were to be found a new home.
This made my life a lot easier, when my wife asked me how I was getting on with “my stuff” I just said, “yeah, pretty much there”, most of it had gone! I was sorry to part with certain things but to be honest some clothes I hadn’t worn for years so I am sure others will find better use for them.The packing wasn’t much of a problem, it just never seemed to finish, it went on and on and on! “Darling is this coming or staying?”, was the question that haunted me all week. I just programmed myself to say “staying!” without even looking at it! We were downsizing from a large two floor dúplex to a smaller penthouse so it wasn’t all going to fit anyway.
The big day arrived and I had to shoot off to pick up my daughter’s new bed, meanwhile the two guys we had hired turned up, only there weren’t two guys, but one! I admit he was a very strong guy but he still only had one pair of hands. This posed a major problem as I am sure you can envisage! The removal man said the other guy was ill and couldn’t come and there was no one that could cover him. It meant I had to rush back and become that other guy! At this point I am starting to get a very vivid picture of the next 12 hours, sheer hell! Stress is starting to kick in! My wife is on the phone to me going around the bend! "How are we going to do it? We have to be out this weekend!” and she starts to panic! It was a bloody nightmare! “Calm down I’ll be there in no time and we’ll get on with it”. Nonetheless my wife wasn’t going to wait around and started getting stuck in too, only to see when I had returned that she had pretty much done her back in trying to lift something that she obviously couldn’t lift, a dishwasher! Fair play to her though , she didn’t want to give up and was convinced she would eventually get it out of….. the kitchen. She gladly stepped aside and I quickly became Mr Removal Man. OH MY GOD! I am not a weak person by any means, but stamina was a slight problem here. Being used to working with computers and paper work most of my life, my fond memories of physical excercise as a younger person weren’t really helping me much. I soon started to realise I wasn’t as fit as I thought I was. Oh no! Not in the slightest! By midday, and about three van loads later I was starting to feel the results; aches, pains and utter exhaustion. Nonetheless we had achieved a rythmn and things were moving on. Fill up the van, take the van around to the front door of the new building, unload the van, take the stuff over to the lift, fill the lift, unload the lift and start all over again and again and again! By lunch time rationality was starting to disappear and we started to make absurd offers to people we knew and friends to help us out! Fortunately, hands started to appear throughout the day, friends, some family and so on, but they quickly got tired and “had to go!” understandable really, it was a real killer. I think I must owe about five dinners in my new house to the different volunteers!
Alessandro, the Italian across the road was, making pizzas all afternoon and feeding mouths as my wife ordered the hands. Couldn’t have them getting tired now, that would have been a catastrophy! Anyway the day progressed and by the afternoon the few things that were left were the sofa and the bed. Our bed is a wrought iron 4 poster, and guest what, it didn’t fit in the lift, even when taken to pieces! Yes we had to lugg it up 7 floors. The same with the sofá. You might be thinking why didn't we hire an mechanical lift, as they do in Spain, to take things up the facade of the building, well unfortunately that wasn’t posible with this building as they have enormous ground floor terraces making the angle imposible to use one. So up they went, one by one, piece by piece, floor by floor. This was probably the worst moment of the entire move. Cramp started to set in, arms, legs, hands and parts of the body I never knew even existed started to move involuntarily. As soon as I let go of the bed to rest on the 4th floor, my hand started to close all by itself and my arms bent as if they had a life of their own, as the muscles contracted! Very wierd sensation. Eventually the main stuff was done and we stopped for the day, leaving the lesser articles for the following day.
Once everything was in the new house, you would have thought that the stress level would have come down. Like hell it did! Now put everything away, hang the lights, connect the washing machine, the dishwasher, put together some new wardrobes, a storage hut for the terrace, which came with 50 pages of instructions. It had only just begun! It wasn’t until a couple of weeks had passed that everything was in it’s place and it’s not until everything is in it’s place that stress starts to diminish. So, curtains hung, everything connected, pictures up on the wall, storage hut put together, internet online and a very long ecetera , we finally realised that it was all done, we were finally in our new house. It was only then that we even started to look around and say to ourselves, yes, I quite like it here! At the same time we thought, well we had better like it because we have no intention of moving in a long long time!
So when told that moving is the most stressful event after a divorce, I now say, ABSOLUTELY. It is a nightmare and nothing can prepare you for a move like this!
So in my next poll I thought it would be interesting to see what really are the most stressful events in peoples lives, look out for the poll and cast your vote, you know what will be number 1 for me!!