So the wonderful aforementioned move happened this weekend. And if by "wonderful" I mean "totally awful and painful," then yes, it was wonderful.
Since the UHaul wasn't available to be picked up until 10:30, we decided to start out by making one trip to the apartment to move smaller things in our cars: clothes from the closet, random stuff that didn't make it into boxes, and a truckload of boxes by the courtesy of Edgar's best friend, who has a big truck and was able to help us until 3:00. So far so good. Besides a lot of sweat and the annoyance of clothes falling off of hangers and hangers falling off of clothes as we carried armfuls from the closet to the car, then in turn from the car to the closet, there was no big problem other than the cat. He was not pleased at all the hub-bub and tried to decapitate me with his hind claws when I finally trapped him to lock him up in the bathroom so that he couldn't escape out of the front door.
The first trip was completed and unloaded by around 10:00, so we had a little bit of time to relax before we picked up the UHaul. Edgar's brother and best friend headed back to the apartment to pack another load of boxes into his truck while we went with his mother to pick up the UHaul. By the time we got back the load of boxes was ready to go in the truck and we started packing up the UHaul. This is where things started to fall apart.
If you've been keeping count, thus far there have been two huge-ass loads of boxes packed into our friend's truck. One would think, for a simple two bedroom apartment, that there couldn't be much more. This is where you'd be wrong. We still had about 20 boxes that had to be loaded in to the UHaul. My mother-in-law is a pack rat of the worst kind, because she insists that she's not a pack rat. "But I did throw stuff away!" "But we've lived here for 12 years, that's a lot of things over that time!" "But some of this stuff is the kids'!". Etcetera, ad nauseum. A rebuttal: Throwing away an old tube of lipstick and a VHS tape is not "throwing stuff away." Just because you accumulate things over 12 years does not mean that you need to keep them when they become obsolete *ahem VCR*, broken *ahem bookshelf*, or are replaced *ahem 3 food processors*. If your 33 year old sons who have moved out (not counting our brief stay with them--all of The Hubby's things are in storage save his clothes and his PS3) have not come back to claim any of those items in the years since they have moved out, they obviously don't need it anymore and you should throw it away. Especially when you ask them if they want it and they specifically say "No, throw it away." That is not code for putting it back where you found it. I took a picture of the huge pile of boxes and once i find my USB cord I will upload a picture for your viewing pleasure.
Anyways, once the boxes are done, I bring the ugly truth front and center and tell the guys (Edgar, his brother, and his friend) that we need to move the piano. If we wait until the end to do it, everyone's muscles will already be shot and there will be no way to get it done. Heaviest stuff done first, then on to the lighter lifting. Oh, the piano. It's an upright with a leg that's falling off. So there's that. We got it out the door on to the landing easily enough, but then there was the issue of getting it down the stairs. Yes, we are on the second floor. The guys did make a valiant effort, I'll give them that. They had the thing rigged up on a dolly, prepared to ease it down one step at a time with two of them standing in the backfield with ropes pulling in the opposite direction for tension. It seemed like a good plan. Until the first step, were it became abundantly clear that there was no way in hell that that piano was going to make it down those steps in one piece. Back to the drawing board, kiddos. Needless to say the piano went back inside and is still there as I write this. We finally convinced my mother-in-law that she needs to hire professional piano movers, something that she had insisted that we wouldn't need. Until the the time she heard the horrible sound the piano made as it went down that first step. My only question left is how they got the damn thing up those stairs in the first place.
The Piano Incident, as it will forever be known, ate up about 45 minutes of our precious moving time. I say 'precious' because we only had Edgar's friend until 3:00 and the UHaul had to be turned in at 6:30. And the more we started to move other things, the more it became clear to us that we had no chance in hell of finishing anywhere in that timeframe. And that's when my mother-in-law and brother-in-law decided to go pick up a couple of guys at Home Depot. Antonio and Angelino, wherever you are now.......you are my heroes. Dear Lord, these guys kicked that apartment's ass. They walked in the door, asked where they should start, and they didn't stop until it was over. I think that I now firmly come down on the side of supporting illegal immigration.
Of course, that doesn't mean that the day wasn't still without hiccups. The first was the UHaul itself. We ordered the 24 or 27 foot UHaul, I'm not sure which. Either way, on the UHaul website, it gives the description that it's good for a place with 3-4 bedrooms. Thanks to the packrat tendencies of my mother-in-law as previously described, that 2 bedroom apartment easily filled that UHaul to bursting. Of course, with the guys just dropping stuff in the UHaul and going back for another load of funiture, they were only using the horizontal space, not the vertical space available. I eventually had to step in and save them, organizing and piling things to make it all fit. I'm quite proud of myself. I do owe it all to my dad though, that man is the Packing Master (hmmm, that sounds dirty, must come up with a different description). He can pack an entire room into a suitcase, walls and all. I happily called him later and told him that he did, in fact, teach me something in my 25 years of life; he got a good laugh out of it.
Another thing that was not so good: the state of the furniture once we got it to the house. No one was brilliant enough to think to use furniture pads or blankets, so a lot of the furniture had chips and nicks. Maybe even a couple of gashes. All courtesy of the eleventy-billion speed bumps in their new neighborhood.
Of course, the bright, shining spot of badness for the day had all to do with the cat. Once we were done moving stuff out of the apartment, I went to get him out of the bathroom to stow him in the car and transport him to the new house. When I opened the bathroom door, my nostrils received the putrid greeting of cat poo. Fiyero, while sometimes being a very loving cat, also has a spiteful streak. When he's pissed off at us, he retaliates by crapping outside of his litter box. Right on the floor next to it. As in "I want you to know that I know where my litter box is and what I'm supposed to do there, but I'm doing it on the floor because I think you deserve it." (By the way, this was the second surprise that he left us that day. When we moved the couch away from the wall, we were both equally amazed and disgusted to find a hairball stuck to the wall behind the couch. He likes to lay on the back of the couch, and apparently one day, probably a couple months ago juding by the texture of it, he had a hairball while laying there and just turned his head and spewed it in the tiny space between the couch and the wall). After I cleaned the poop up, I was finally able to get ahold of him. He fought me all the way down to the car. I had to carry him myself, as he outgrew his kitty carrier long, long ago. Once inside the car, he continued to fight me while I grapsed on to him until all of the doors were closed. I finally let him go, at which point he collapses in my lap, looks at me with a pathetic look in his eyes, and begins to pant. I have never seen another cat pant, and I've only seen him do it once before, on a car ride as well. But he was going whole hog this time. He even was making noise. He sounded like a dog about twice his size. So dramatic. When I got him to the new house, it was straight to the bathroom again for him, since we had to move all of the furniture in. He learned how to exact new torture on me at this point. I closed the door to the bathroom, walked to the kitchen to get a bowl of water for him (panting crybaby), but when I opened the door to the bathroom to give it to him.....he was gone. Checked the bathtub, not there. Checked behind the toilet, not there. Even opened the cabinet under the sink, not there either. I started freaking out. How did he get out of here? Did he sneak out the door just before I closed it? Did he become invisible? Did he magically learn how to walk through walls? Luckily, my cat did not turn all magic on me; Edgar found him pressed against the wall crouching in fear in the 6-inch space between the floor and the bottom of the cabinet. He didn't come out of there until after midnight that night. Even after all of the moving was done and everyone else had left and the house was quiet, he still stayed there. We slept with out bedroom door open that night so that he could come in and be with us (this is normally not an option as he likes to think that feet that move under the covers are monsters and need to be pounced on and bitten). Come into be with us he surely did, jumping on my stomach and walking all over us repeatedly.
We also 'lost' the cat again on Sunday. He was truly making a case for being magically magical. We couldn't find him for hours, but we eventually realized that he was inside of this huge overstuffed armchair. Not under it. Inside of it. The lining on the bottom had ripped in transit, and he realized this at some point. He got through the lining and up in to the actual structure of the chair. And would not come out. We finally had to tip the the chair backwards, me almost in tears because I was sure that we would end up breaking his neck somehow, to shake him out, then put the chair up against the wall so he couldn't climb back in. He was not pleased. He then retreated under my in-laws bed for the rest of the day and didn't come out until around 6 pm. He seemed in better spirits this morning, so hopefully we won't have anymore of the "Disappearing Cat" act.
All drama aside, we're settling nicely into the new place. It was a joy to take a shower this morning in a bathroom that wasn't stifling hot, and to be able to blow dry my hair and not be sweating buckets when I was finished. It was nice to sleep with the wonderful central air keeping me cool. It was nice to be in a quiet neighborhood where there aren't annoying children and dogs making noise at all hours (wow, I sounded about 60 there). It was nice to have an ice-maker in the freezer, not crappy ice cube trays. It's actually a really nice place. I wouldn't mind having a place like that in a few years when Edgar and I have kids.
So that was moving day. And I get to do it all again in two weeks. Oh, the joy.
