Moving Day

We all know that alongside planning events moving is right up there with being one of the most stressful things that we all chose to do. It can be made doubly difficult when you don't drive and have to employ movers to help you and your husband get the job done and it is usually helped along by friends that want to get the job done as quickly as possible in order to get down the pub. Our move was exceptional in the chronicles of what can go wrong?

Well to start with trying to find someone affordable and professional turned out to be an absolute nightmare,most companies don't charge by the hour they charge by volume,miles and randomly flights of stairs,then they add a labour cost,a premium which can make it closer to thousands rarher than hundreds. An appraiser turns up in a new series merc with gucci bag and shoes that wonders around your property with a clipboard a tape measure and a look like she has stepped in something,polite enough but condescending,she then goes away to work out your "quote". We needed a tv to be boxed up as stupidly I threw ours out which shouldn't be a problem but then the quote comes in and even though it is just one box and everything else has been packed up you will get charged for a full packing service which actually makes youwant to unpack your home again to justify the 300 pound they want to charge you for a full packing service!!

Having decided to go with a start up company that were looking to build up their clientelle and reviews we fully expected that moving day would be stressful but hopefully less stressful than staying put.

Early morning saturday a van pulls up to my neighbours house and starts knocking on their door,not their fault really as the satnav will regularly take people to our neighbour,we chase them down as they get ready to leave due to know answer,at the wrong house, and they then decide to appraise the situation and decided how to best proceed. In my mind emptying out the upstairs first so that we can get bedrooms set up as everything comes into the house seems the way to go,finishing with white goods and living room furniture in the last load. Makes sense to me,not how it happened, firstly we are doing a homeswap so we are at the mercy of the other tenants,most of which are standing around yakking and not made any progress when my husband arrived with my closest mate in the car,secondly the house is in a new built area so a lot of the time the satnav takes you round the back of our house which meant that the first load we had sent off at my end got lost. 45 minutes after leaving our old home I get a call from my husband asking if they had left yet, still puzzles me as they left before hubby had friend did!

During the process of loading the movers decided they knew best with the way things should go on the truck,what they didn't know is that I quite literally have a box for everything in each room, watching them trying to get it done at double speed had my in stitches. Especially when they grabbed ahold of my book collection,one poor guy bent down to pick the box up and realised pretty quickly that it would take at least two of them,they got it on to the van and the guy moving it all into order nearly fell over the box and out of the van when he tried to heft it into place pretty much giving himself a hernia in the process and swearing liberally while rubbing his lower back,I tried my hardest not to laugh at him while he pushed it along the van with his feet then watched as he repeated the process with my sons weight bag. I feel like he came away from the process of moving us with a new found sense of humbleness about his muscular prowess,or rather the lack of it.

After four and a half hours,most of which was spent waiting to be able to unload and then reload the vans we paid the removals company and thanked them for their help, I've never seen anyone so grateful to walk away from a job as these poor guys were! I'm hyper prganised so when I finally got to the new house I could have cried,everything was everywhere due to not having the space to be able to unload how it was packed up I ended up with kitchen stuff upstairs along with the living room stuff while all the clothes and bedroom stuff was downstairs, what should have been a simple enough transference became sheer chaos,two weeks later I am still trying to get organised to decorate and feel like I am fighting a losing battle of wills,me versus the avalanche of boxes and bags,trying to squeeze a 3bed house into a 2bed!