Moving out: Packing is a stressful writer downsizing
Freelance writer Carola Vyhnak leaves her four-hectare country home north of Cobourg for a smaller town in a nearby town. In the ninth episode of her downsizing journey, she descends into packing hell.
Forty-seven holes. As if filling endless boxes wasn’t enough, I now have to plug all the nail holes in the walls. The new owners probably won’t appreciate moving into a house that looks like it’s been used for target practice.
The gallery wall in the living room is the worst offender, but several artistic works hang throughout the house, from my granddaughter’s self-portrait to the barnboard coat rack.
Which brings me back to packing: Where do I keep a framed 21-by-25-inch page of “The Toronto Star Weekly” from 1932? It doesn’t fit in the upright bin where the smaller photos are lined up, cushioned by thin foam sheets from the moving kit that my real estate agent Jacqueline Pennington.
Her team has arranged for both houses to be cleaned for free when I move out, which clears two things off my to-do list. (Is there anything this cop angel hasn’t thought of?)
Barb, whose house I’m buying, hints at an 11 a.m. pandemonium in a late email hours before her “big move.”
“I’m exhausted. I thought I was organized, but there’s so much last-minute packing,” she whines, noting that her husband Chris is the type who wants to “throw it all in.”
Apparently Barb and I are doing it all wrong. A friend boasts that he boxed his entire bedroom and kitchen a week before his last move, only having a plate, fork and mug to hand. (What did he eat? What did he wear?) Then he waved his magic wand and bibbidi-bobbidi-boo, the movers finished the job in 90 minutes.
“You just have to be organized,” he calmly advises.
For me, packing is both an art and a science, based on logic, practicality and militaristic precision. Similar items or items destined for a particular room are arranged just like that in boxes of the right size, no wasted space.
Too late, I realize that a moving professional’s advice to buy $2.45 medium boxes from Home Depot is misguided. They are not strong enough to support much weight, and this results in half-empty boxes. So I fall back on boxes from retailers and score seven free beauties just like that.
Later, online, it boosts my packing confidence again Michael Kerr, a professional speaker who marvels at the way of women with suitcases in a blog post.
“Watching a woman … is like witnessing a surgeon performing brain surgery,” he writes. “You may not fully understand what’s going on, but you feel you’re in the presence of something truly remarkable.”
It was the same way with my dad, who demonstrated his wizardry by piecing things into place on family camping trips. He painstakingly loaded tent, poles, stove, cooking pots, sleeping bags and suitcases into every nook and cranny of the car before the three of us and the dog forced ourselves into the holes he had left in the backseat.
That doesn’t work to transport my oversized green relatives to their new home. Six feet tall dwarf Umbrella trees and three-metre-wide Dieffenbachias (a type of houseplant) don’t like being hunched over in a car or crammed between furniture on a moving truck.
But for $100 I can rent a van and get my green safely there a few days early. And there’s plenty of room left for essentials like toilet paper, no matter how it’s in there.
Next: The next chapter
