Friday to Sunday this week was dedicated to loading the U-Pack shipping container with all the stuff we are going to live without for at least the next couple months, and likely until around Halloween, when our house in New Hampshire is scheduled to be complete.
It’s funny — we went through (like many) the KonMari process of cleaning up and decluttering years ago, and I thought we were pretty good with keeping up on it. Maybe compared to some people, we are fairly minimalist, but this whole experience highlighted just how much stuff we have. Way too much. I mean, a whole shipping container, and we’re leaving a lot of furniture behind — donating, trashing, etc.
This is also the first time we hired people to help load the truck up. Of course, it was 15 years ago that we last moved, but there comes a point in a person’s life where you don’t ask your friends to help move if you have the financial means to not do so. Old backs don’t heal quite as fast as they used to. That, and we do have a few very heavy items that would have been very difficult without specialized equipment. What I didn’t foresee was the need for the expertise needed in the load. The U-Pack shipping container is a lot higher than a U-Haul or like truck, and using all that vertical space takes skill. I was impressed.
5 days to moving out of our house of 15 years! Bittersweet. I’ll be saying that a lot, I think.
Columbia Gorge Dispatch 