On The Move!

JULIA SPENCER-FLEMING: It's moving day! No, not for me, thank God, but for my daughter and her family. My part is to be at their current house at 7:15 am (keep in mind it's an hour and twenty minute drive...) and watch my grandson "Paulie" while his mothers travel to Lewiston, Maine to sign the documents. Then, when they return, I'm taking their dogs - yes, again, but only for overnight this time. With their cat safely, if unhappily, locked in a room in the new place, this will clear the way for the local moving company to shift them 33 miles west.

 

 My last move, in 1994, was also with a baby - six weeks instead of four months. Also? I had a seventeen-month old (that's the person who qualifies for a mortgage now. Sure didn't imagine that back then!)

 

Ross and I also hired a moving company, and, like Victoria and her wife, tried to pack up as much as possible to make the process quicker (we were only going 16 miles west!) However, Ross was a lawyer working something like 14 hours a day, and what little management/organizational ability I had was utterly scrambled by motherhood. It didn't help that we didn't actually start the process until a week before the moving truck arrived, unlike my daughter-in-law, who bought dozens of boxes and began packing as soon as their offer was accepted.

 

 I recall the process only in glimpses, similar to the way people in a car only remember flashes of the terrible accident. There was the moment we were both up at 3am, trying to clean the kitchen while passing the fussy baby back and forth. At one point, I was nursing my son in the cab of the mover's truck, sobbing. For some reason, I have a clear memory of having no box in which to put the under-sink cleaning products, and deciding, "&#$% it, it'll just transfer with possession." Then nothing until Ross and I were standing in the main 40X20 foot room, saying to one another, "How are we ever going to fill all this space?" (Spoiler: we did.)

 

I've been in the same house since then, and friends and my children ask me if I consider getting someplace smaller, on one floor, say, and with MUCH less yard to maintain.  And that would be nice! But honestly? I'm not sure I've recovered from the last move yet.

 

Dear readers, what are your moving stories?

 

 

Moving Day!

JENN McKINLAY: For the fourth time in five years, the Hooligans are moving. The first couple of moves, Hub and I were all in, helping schlep their worldly possessions up three flights of stairs (why?!) to their new abode. This time, I am conveniently back east and Hub is booked with gigs. 

Huh. Weird how that worked out.

Even though we look forward to retiring and moving "someday" that day is a ways off for me and Hub. We've been in our home for 26 years--Amazing! Before that, I moved eight times. Since we are out of the moving loop, I had to look up stats because that's who I am (librarian!). So here are some interesting things I learned from CT Moving and Storage:

1. The average person will move 11.7 times in their life. 

2. Half of all moves happen between May and September. 

3. Typical household moves contain at least 6,500 pounds worth of moveable items. 

4. Moving is the 3rd most stressful event in a person’s life. 

5. Friday is the most popular moving day. 

6. About 40 million Americans move every year, making up 17% of the US population. 

7. California, Texas, and Florida are the top moving destinations. 

8. The average American home contains over 300,000 items. 

9. The most common item left behind during a move is the shower curtain. 

10.  Packing the kitchen is considered the most time-consuming part of a move. 

For laughs, here's the classic "pivot" scene from Friends:

How about you, Reds and Readers? How many times have you moved and how did it go?

Spring Cleaning for the Empty Nester

 JULIA SPENCER-FLEMING: I'm getting started on my Spring cleaning, and some of you may be saying, "Isn't this a little late for for that, Julia?" Others of you with low and snarky minds may be saying, "What, Spring cleaning 2019?" But friends, I honestly have a good reason to drag my feather duster this year - the Maine Millennial is moving out.  Into her very own, title-and-mortgage house! 

As some of you may recall, she moved back in with me in December 2019, after breaking up with the Very Tall Boyfriend. Then stuff happened. You may have read about it in the news. Two and a half years later, she has a new job, a new guy (the Very Redheaded Boyfriend) and finally, a home of her own. (More about this Saturday.)

 

Her very small bedroom, which looked like a ship container stuffed with used first world clothing headed for the tropics? Will be emptied.

 

Her Ebay side hustle (she's a millennial, of course she has a side hustle) which has required me to turn over 75% of my family room to storing wares, empty boxes, and packing material? Will be relocated.

 

Her cat, who stopped using the downstairs litter box and began PEEING IN MY BEDROOM until I got it a new litter box all of its own (which I also empty every other day, because, again, bedroom)? Will be in a new bedroom. Which has wall to wall carpeting. Heh heh heh heh heh.

 

Her dog, who barks at the slightest pretext and follows me everywhere I go, and whom I have been caring for five to seven days a week for the past eighteen months? Will be trying out a new day care. The Maine Millennial's new house is an hour and a quarter away from me, way too far to drop the dog off. It's sad. So very sad. I am sad. Do you believe me? 

 

And of course, all the little things that get dropped, left, crumpled and misplaced will cease to exist. 

 

It's not that I regret having the Maine Millennial here, or that I won't miss her. She could have moved out after finished grad school, but that was when Ross started to get sick, and her presence (and car) was a godsend. When the pandemic shut us all up our bubbles, she (and Youngest and Guest Son) kept me busy and moderately sane. And most importantly, having her spend the bulk of her twenties at home, without charging rent or expenses, enabled her to save up enough money for a twenty per cent down payment, with enough cash left over to buy a new queen bed and a sectional sofa. That was a great gift to be able to give her.

But now, baby, this house is mine, all mine! I'm going to be dusting. And sweeping. And vacuuming. And mopping.  Since I didn't really do anything with it when she went to college, there are parts of her bedroom that haven't been touched since it became hers in 2004. The family room will be getting a deep cleaning for the first time in years, and I'm going to be tossing out SO much stuff I don't need or want anymore. Just losing two pets out of six will lower the animal-hair-everywhere quotient by a third!

 

How about you, dear readers? Have you ever said, "Yee-haw!" when getting rid of the last child?  Did you roll up your sleeves to scrape Pokemon stickers off the wall? And did they ever come back? (No, don't tell me that last. I don't want to know.)

Move Me

ETA: We'll announce this weeks book giveaway winners tomorrow, when Tim O'Mara will be our guest. Be sure to tune in!


JULIA SPENCER-FLEMING: The past couple of weeks I've been helping my next-door neighbor get her house ready to put on the market. (If any of you are interested in an historic 1840s house in a charming rural village in southern Maine, send me an email and I'll pass it on!) Two things have struck both of us: the enormous amount of stuff that people accumulate without even trying, and the irony that your house will never look as perfect as when you're putting it up for sale. In my neighbor's case, a kitchen re-painting that she always meant to do suddenly made the room brighter than it had been in years. She and her husband also finally carted out everything that had landed in the convenient-for-storage summer kitchen, and she finally set it up as a dining room the way she always wanted.The last time Ross and I moved, the Smithie was 16 months and The Boy was 6 weeks old. Closing, packing, cleaning and relocating with two tiny children was so traumatic, I vowed I would never move again. So far, almost twenty years later, I'm still in the same place. One of the things I found frustrating was the same phenomenon my neighbor is experiencing: we waited until we were leaving our little Cape Cod starter home to do all the things we had said we were going to do. The wheezy old refrigerator was replaced with a brand-new model; the stained plastic flooring in the bathroom was ripped out and a lovely black-and-white tile installed, we painted the upstairs and the garage was - for the first and only time in our history - neatly organized. By the time it was ready to show, we didn't want to leave!

I have very few memories of packing to move - nursing round the clock and severely sleep-deprived, the only thing I can recall is tossing books into milk crates while simultaneously breast-feeding my baby at 3am. So my sense of how much we had accumulated at that point is hazy. However, when my father-in-law died in 2002, I took the lead in cleaning out his southern California apartment, and I was amazed at the quantity of bits and pieces that one man could leave behind. After sorting and tossing, we shipped at least ten large cartons from Laguna Niguel to Maine - and had 32 banana boxes filled with recyclable goods to donate to the Salvation Army. What makes it even more amazing is that my father-in-law consciously tried to live minimally, buying little, passing along objects to friends and family. Another good reason to never move: with an attic, a cellar, and a large barn to use as storage, Ross and I have undoubtedly gathered enough flotsam and jetsam to star in an episode of HOARDERS.

How about you, Reds? Any memorable moves in the past? Coming up in the future? And do you tend to hang on to your stuff, or get rid of it as soon as you can?LUCY BURDETTE: I hope no moves are coming up! Yikes, it's such an ordeal. Still I've been trying to pare away some things this summer, imagining what it would be like if someone else had to come in and clear it all out. My medicine cabinet, for example, probably holds 30 to 40 bottles of nail polish, some of them crusty from decades of disuse. The only time I use nail polish these days, is for a Jungle Red Writers event! My next door neighbor moved just weeks ago. It was definitely traumatic. But her realtor recommended a woman who packs and sorts and moves other people's junk for a living. I have to tell you, this was a godsend. Maybe if this writing gig doesn't work out...Jungle Red Movers anyone?

HALLIE EPHRON: I'm a thrower outer and my husband is a bringer inner. I like to think maybe there's some zero sum game going on but sadly he's in the lead. So I like to think we're never moving. Never. Ever. Because if we do it will be ugly.

DEBORAH CROMBIE: We've spent the last eighteen years getting our house done exactly the way we want it, even down to, finally, an outside color I like.  So I definitely want to stay here and enjoy it! (Not thinking about needing to refinish the hardwood floors... Not thinking...) But I'm finding myself becoming more and more obsessive about organizing and cleaning stuff out even though we have no intention of moving any time soon.  I moved my parents and then my mother five times over the last dozen years of my parents' lives, and was absolutely horrified by the amount of stuff involved even though my parents' homes had never LOOKED cluttered. (I'm still using boxes of my mother's staples and paperclips...)

If we ever do move, I want Lucy's neighbor's lady!!! In the meantime, I'm definitely going to tackle those old bottles of nail polish.

RHYS BOWEN: The word MOVE sends shivers down my spine. We have quite a big house and we've lived in it since 1980--time to accumulate lots of stuff. Our children say in threatening manner "Don't you dare die and leave us with all this."  I'm currently trying to get John to go through the mountains of papers in his office. One of the reasons I love our condo in Arizona is that we started from scratch with a new condo and there is no clutter, no boxes of dubiously outdated Christmas ornaments or John's old school reports lurking anywhere. It's easy to clean, it looks nice and bright. In California every closet is full of things that should probably go, plus odd assortment of souvenirs left by our kids--letter jacket, T shirt from big swim meet, even a first sewing machine, that I'm too soft hearted to discard. But we have been upgrading the house bit by bit. All new doors. New toilets in all bathrooms. New hall floor scheduled next. Then a repaint job. But I'm staying put until they drag me out.

HANK PHILLIPPI RYAN: Moving. The WORST. Here is a confession and a writing thing.

The writing thing: my editor asked me this about my main character Jane Ryland: "Who moved her in to her apartment? " The thing that's' so brilliant about that is how evocative and informative it is. Don't you know so much about a person if you know the answer to that? Did they use a mover, or friends? Champagne, or beer? An incredible amount of stuff, or bare bones?Walk-up, or penthouse with private elevator? SO helpful!

The confession, and as a result the best move ever: A TV station I worked for was so happy that I'd accepted the job, they offered to pay for my cross-country move. No holds barred. (I can tell you thins now, because it was  long time ago.)

Listen to this. I did nothing. I said to the movers: Here. Here's my apartment. See you at the other end.

It was hilarious. First of all, it was a joy. They packed everything.  However,  when I UNpacked, I unwrapped cereal boxes, half-bottles of ketchup, rolls of toilet paper, used bath soap. They'd packed everything, without any thought about what might actually be needed or logical. I guess it was faster that way.

Gotta tell you, Reds, even so.  That's the way to move.  

ROSEMARY HARRIS: Bruce and I put our New York apartment on the market a few years back. We got rid of extra furniture, painted, moved a few things. (Wow...these closets are big! Look at that light.) When we saw the agent's pix online we thought - What a great place! Liked it so much we decided to stay. Still there.

In CT - I love my house. I'd love it even more if I had a basement, an attic or two extra rooms. And because of the terrain, it's impossible to add on. And will be difficult to negotiate once we get older (you have to see it...three levels, open staircases, lots of windows, i.e., few walls, rocky steps all over the outside, tree growing through one of the decks. I used to joke about parents signing a waiver when their kids came over. Now I'm thinking about seniors.) So we went house hunting. Saw an interesting place 50 miles further north. Then reality set in....we'd have to MOVE. By the time we did everything we'd need to do to get our house ready for sale...like the NY apt. we'd probably want to stay.
So here we stay. With frequent purges and trips to Goodwill or Sally Army to avoid the hoarders syndrome.

So, Julia. How many acres and how many square feet?

JULIA: I agree with Hank. Or, if I can't have movers magically whisk my worldy goods from here to there, I plan on staying till I croak. Let my kids and grandkids deal with the junk!

How about you, dear readers? Any moving horror stories? Happy stories? Do you flip houses, or are have you moved in for good?