Saturday, August 23, 2008

Just Follow the Sound of My Voice

...because I'm buried in packing paper. Our sea shipment was delivered last Monday. By 3pm on Tuesday, we were drowning in a sea of boxes and a ridiculous amount of furniture. 3 trucks. 5 containers. 240 boxes. I started feeling a little short of breath. Oh, but wait, the fun wasn't over yet.

On Wednesday, our long term storage arrived. Adding 137 boxes to our movefest. We just stacked it all in the garage, because we figured that most of that stuff was not going to live in our house for very long. When two semi-packrats get married and combine households, you are bound to end up with a plethora of crap. Likewise when you move overseas. So, combine those two situations and you end up with a house that looks like ours. It's bad. Very, very bad. I keep reminding myself that at least we are not in the same boat as some friends of ours who recently moved back to the US after ten years overseas - they have to throw most of their long term storage away because of rat infestation. They learned this AFTER the boxes were delivered to their house. Rat traps had to be set. So...it could always be worse.

So we spent all week just trying to chip away at the mountain of unnecessary crap that we have accumulated over the last 15 years or so. We are slightly disgusted with ourselves at the amount of junk we have accumulated. It's gluttonous. We made a really good dent on Saturday by going through EVERY box in the garage, also known as the "Why the hell did we keep this?" game. A plastic punch ladle, a pillow from Triad #1's childhood bedroom, a wooden fish. Why? Two donation trips and two dump trips and we were able to see part of our garage floor again.

Inside is still pretty much a total mess. Furniture everywhere. Paper and boxes are strewn about. We are trying to take it room by room but I'm going to bust a blood vessel if things don't get straight soon. Unpacking these boxes creates even more of a mess because of the insane amount of packing materials they use. A huge box and a giant pile of packing paper in the floor and for what? Three coffee mugs. And then there are what our friend affectionately refers to crapwads. When movers pack up your stuff, they pack up whatever is laying around. Trash, passports, pen lids, change, if it's not nailed down or a weapon of some sort, it gets packed up. So you come across some nondescript wad, and after unwrapping the approximate 87 layers of paper, you discover it's a tiny plastic gold ball. Or a container of pencil lead. Or four paper clips. It's a fun game.

2 comments:

Triad #1 said...

Never fear, Monica Geller will be there....this weekend. I'll have that place so clean you could use Ava as a mop. You'd better tell M that if it's not tied down, I'm going to "Jen" it.

Anonymous said...

Ha ha ha! When we moved to NY, the packers packed up my bedroom wastebasket. With trash in it. In its own box. That was a funny one to unpack in our tiny NY apartment.