Moving on Up

Here at the Crazy Cave, we are gearing up to take on one of life’s major stresses. Before the end of the month, we will be moving house.

Luckily, we are renting, so we don’t have to deal with the extra hassles associated with house sales, such as contracts, solicitors, settlement … the list goes on. We've done that a couple of times before and, while I would love to own a house again one day, I am so glad that we don’t have to deal with those extra things this time around.

We are also staying in the same region, so we don't have to travel a long way or organise new schools for our kids.

 

No, for this move the stress is all about mundane tasks like decluttering, packing, cleaning, as well as the organisational duties - changing our address with everyone who has our details, arranging for the power and phone to be disconnected here and reconnected at the new place, and letting all our friends know where to find us. 

We are also both not currently working, which you might think makes things easier, but in a lot of ways it doesn't. It’s true we have more time and energy to put into the move – but we also have very little money to put towards it. We can’t afford removalists; we will be doing it ourselves, using our own car and trailer (although we may manage to pay someone to move a couple of the bigger items for us). Of course, the job hunting doesn’t stop while we are doing this either. If one or both of us gets a job in the middle of the move, we’ll just have to take the proverbial spoonful of cement and toughen up, to cope with the extra workload. Not that it would matter too much - we would be so grateful for the job, I think we could handle anything!

Many hands make light work, naturally. Thank goodness the kids are all old enough to be really helpful with this move. We are working as a team to get through all the tasks we need to accomplish in the next two weeks.

We have already started with the decluttering. The other members of my family don’t find it any easier to get rid of ‘stuff’ than I do, but we are all pulling up our big girl (and boy!) panties and getting on with it. We hired a skip bin last year and did a huge clean out, so we don’t have to do much more to really be on top of things. It is amazing though, how much one family can accumulate. In our case, there are a lot of sentimental items like old letters and photos, as well as schoolwork and drawings by the kids. However, there are also plenty of ornaments, toys, clothes and so many books that we just don't need anymore. Not to mention the objects we 'might need one day' or that 'only need to be repaired and it will be useful again'. Then there are other items that take up space just because we like to look at them (yes, Caveman, I’m talking about all those sports trophies!).

I think our local second-hand shops are going to do quite well out of us in the next week or two …