One of the reasons for the extended hiatus was that right as I was getting ready to come back and start writing again, I found out I was going to be moving soon. This made for a very hectic late spring. I’m now through the brunt of it, and want to document the process.
My mom was a doctor in the Army when I was a kid, so moving is not a new process for me. But this is the first time I did it mostly on my own (I had help moving a couple large and heavy items I couldn’t take myself), and I’d been at the old place 17 years so my hoarder tendencies finally caught up with me in a big way.
My old apartment’s previous management took over in late 2019. The first manager, who was there for just over a year, was solid. Then he was replaced by a new manager. My first major interaction with the new manager was when my water heater broke and flooded the kitchen; I got it fixed but they forgot to turn the water back on so that took another day. Then that winter my keys and car were stolen (my fault), and it took two days to get someone up to change my apartment lock. (Apparently, the maintenance people came, decided I wasn’t home, and left for the day without doing anything with the lock. I don’t know how they decided I wasn’t home. They didn’t knock or ring the bell, and I was afraid to go anywhere lest the car thieves came back and used my apartment key to get in.)
Further maintenance issues went similarly unaddressed, and I despaired on reporting them. Pest control stopped coming in summer 2022, and a long-standing roach problem that had been kept in check no longer was. (I was able to fight back, which probably only meant the roaches were bothering my neighbors instead of me.) By time the new management took over late last year, my apartment was in pretty bad shape. The new management started cracking down on things that the old team had let slide, so I was just about to see about getting my apartment fixed up when in April I received a note on the door that my month-to-month lease had been terminated and I had until the end of May to vacate.
I went to work quickly, securing a new, bigger apartment within a week. Then the work of boxing things up, loading them into my car, and hauling them over began. You really don’t realize how much stuff you have until you have to move it all. I didn’t have that much heavy furniture that needed moving – really, just my bed and a computer desk1 – so I thought I could get by with an open-bed trailer and a couple trips. Naturally, it rained buckets that day. Everything survived the move, even the electrical outlets on my desk, so it wasn’t too bad. By the middle of the month, I moved my cat over to the new apartment which was now home.
Once that was done I cancelled my cable service. Now, I know they don’t make it easy to cancel, but last year when I dropped my TV service, it was, “Why are you dropping this?” “I don’t use it.” “Oh, okay.” No efforts at retention. So this time, when there was absolutely no hope of retention – my new apartment has cable included – this time I got the full press. Yes, I’m sure I want to cancel. No, I’m not interested in offers to make it cheaper. No, I’m not interested in switching my phone service. Sure, I’ll hold for thirty minutes. Yes, I’m still sure I want to cancel. No, I’m still not interested in offers to make it cheaper. No, I’m still not interested in switching my phone service.
As May drew to a close, I had finally moved the last of my stuff over to the new apartment and only had to get rid of all the junk I had accumulated over 17 years and no longer cared to keep. So it was off to the city dump with it, on yet another day when the weather was fighting me. (In this case, wind.) The next day, I handed in my keys, and closed the book on all the time spent in the old apartment.
Of course, all that left was settling into the new one. Before I got the notice to vacate, I had begun the process of moving my stuff out of boxes and into… well, to be honest, different boxes but boxes actually designed to store things and not cardboard boxes, and not even, in most cases, actual moving boxes. This accelerated those plans, and now I have bookshelves. I have storage shelves. (A couple of these are a replacement for the one thing I really miss about the old apartment, my pantry.) Looking around the apartment, you would think that an actual person actually lives there and isn’t just settled. Of course, all that had to be bought, brought in, set up, and filled out – a process I still haven’t completed, by the way – which is of course more work.
I’m not done yet, but I can finally see the end, and if a day or week goes by without me working on organizing, I don’t feel I wasted it. The new place is bigger, nicer, and not falling apart. I got some things I wanted but didn’t have room for in the old apartment – a water cooler, all the bookshelves. In the end, I’m happier where I am than where I was.
It was just a hassle to get here.