After graduating high school, moving becomes a normal routine in your life. You move into college, you move a decent amount of your stuff home for breaks, you move back home for Summer, and you do it again come August. This doesn’t end after college. You’re young and you’re poor and you have absolutely no idea where you’re going to end up. Maybe you’ll move back home, but you know you won’t be staying there forever. Maybe you’ll move to a city, but who knows how long you’ll last. Maybe you’ll move into some ‘okay’ apartment, but you know you’ll want a nicer apartment soon (as in next year). You’ll move and you’ll move and you’ll move until you settle down… and no one wants to settle down in their twenties (right?). So as much as we try to avoid it, we can’t – We are eventually going to move… and then move again… and again after that.
Currently, I live in Boston – a place where there is a communal ‘move out’ day of August 31st and a communal ‘move in’ day of September 1st. On these days, U-Haul vans, cars, furniture, and people take up any and every street out there making it impossible to get around and leaving everyone involved significantly pissed off at all times. Luckily for me, my family lives close by meaning I can move out of my apartment before D-Day AKA August 31st. But to do this I have to move all of my stuff back home over the course of, like, four days… and then sleep at home a few nights… and THEN finally a few days later (September 1st) I will get the keys to my new apartment… but do I really want to be in the area of chaos on September 1st? Doubt it. So – hello dilemma. For other people, they don’t have the ‘luxury’ of a storage place their parent’s house nearby so they have to move everything out on the 31st, leave their belongings in trucks over night, find somewhere to sleep – whether that be a truck, hotel, or friend’s floor, and then wait to get keys to their new apartment the next day in the afternoon. They can then start moving everything into the new place. This yearly routine destroys Labor Day weekend for 20-somethings all over Boston AND forces us to take days off of work to move when we could have used those days to tan. I mean, what an awful process. But it’s a city of students, so it has to be done.
Moving Out
First we have to pack up all our shit, which usually involves finding clothes we’ve never worn and clothes we thought we lost. We decide what we want to bring with us to the new place and what we don’t. But it’s just so hard to say goodbye, so we often end up taking way more than we need. We go through papers on papers on papers, throwing most of them out but of course keeping others ‘just in case.’ We find millions of little items and have no idea how we’re going to organize everything until we realize we aren’t and that we’re just going to shove everything into boxes.
To do so, we have to get boxes. We can either use old boxes we have lying around (unless we threw them all out, which we most likely did), or we can buy them… which is annoying because UPS is only open during the work day and, like, are they really charging money for cardboard? Once we have our boxes, we must tape them, pack them, and tape them again. We do this on repeat for, like, a couple of hours days. Once everything is packed safely in duffel bags and boxes – and all pictures are off the wall (nails included) – we have to bring everything to the car. This may or may not involve running up and down stairs (hello workout).
In addition to this, we have to get the furniture out. Like, the big ass furniture. We either have to force family members or friends to help us… or hire movers (both will include either money and/or fights). We also have to have a place to put said furniture. It probably won’t fit in our car, if we even have a car… So we have to order moving vans OR again force family members or friends to bring their large vans/trucks as they help us move. And if we don’t want all of our stuff, we have to leave it outside on the sidewalk for for trash pickup aka the male college student’s free ‘yard sale.’ Eventually, all the shit we’re keeping will fit in (or on) some sort of moving vehicle and we’ll be ready to go.
Moving In
Now we have to get all that stuff we either left stored in vans, cars, and/or trucks… or brought into our house… to our new place. We have to do it all again in reverse. Hire movers and force people to help us/do it for us. Get all that furniture inside (even if it doesn’t seem like it’s going to fit through the door – it will). Set the furniture up. Pile boxes on boxes on boxes. And unload. Obviously, since we’ve never seen our new place empty (most of us won’t before we move in), we now have to figure out if everything we’ve brought with us (from clothes to furniture) will fit inside. If not, it’s out to the sidewalk or back to our parent’s house.
Once everything is inside, it’s time to unpack and figure out where the f*ck everything is going. For most of us, we will just say ‘f*ck this‘ and head to the nearest bar for the largest margarita and put it off until tomorrow. But some people will keep going and going until they pass out (why? I have no idea).
Post-Moving
After settling in, we have to arrange furniture, unpack, organize things, and set things up. We have to inspect every inch of our new place to see if there’s anything there that shouldn’t be, if anything needs to be cleaned, and if anything needs to be fixed. We also have to buy an absurd amount of things from furniture to kitchen stuff to cleaning stuff to decorations (ugh, spending money). Oh, and we have to get cable and internet, which can be THE WORST especially when there are no appointments within the next week… or even month. I mean, we can’t live without cable and internet for 24 hours nevermind a WEEK. How annoying?!
Basically the next month (or two) of our lives are dedicated to settling into this place and making it into a ‘home’ even though we know there’s no way we’ll be living there that long… Especially since we will forever associate this place with the stressful move that just happened. We’re post-grads meaning we’re nomads. And even though we hate moving, we don’t want to settle down… so we’re hypocrites. But it’s okay. For now we’ll just complain about moving any time it is in the picture.
1 Comment
haha yes…”male college student’s free ‘yard sale'”