COLUMN: Moving Stinks

I can't remember a time in my life where I was ever so excited for the transition to spring and eventually the high temperatures of summer.

This was a brutal winter with a few weeks I thought would never end. Driving was of course a nightmare and even walking at times was a difficult task and I still have bruises from some of my more epic slips of 2019. We did our best to keep up with our driveway and sidewalks but during the week plus of non-stopping snowing we kind of gave up and instead just did enough to get our poor little car in and out of where it needed to be. My knee always gives me trouble, but the brutal cold of this winter made it worse than ever and that didn't help matters at all.

As much as I am looking forward to spending hours on the back porch enjoying the wonderful Montana summer, I also know that this year I will first have to move.

There are quite a few things I don't enjoy but moving is easily at the top of the list. I have been in my current house for two years and still am a little sore from the last move.

In late April we will be moving to location that is a perfect right in the middle spot for both newspapers and while I'm super excited about that and the actual home, even thinking of the move makes me sick to my stomach.

The actual day or two of doing the physical moving is horrendous, but it is also the before and after that makes it such a grueling process.

It's never until you decide to move that you realize how much stuff you have. I know everyone has keepsakes they will take with them everywhere and I never mind a few extra boxes of those, but it's the other stuff that just drives me crazy.

I'm not quite sure why on earth we have so much stuff, yet we do. Instead of getting rid of it on our last move it has just sat in our garage for two years and hopefully a lot of it can find a new home before we move.

The in-house packing is also a process I could live without. Melissa really loves to be on top of things and will start getting boxes ready weeks before the move. She will carefully start wrapping dishes in newspapers, lord knows we have enough of those lying around, and the house becomes a maze and hard to navigate with boxes everywhere. The last few weeks it's a matter of using paper plates and plastic cups because the dishware is off limits.

I guess I probably should be glad she is so committed to getting things accomplished because if it was up to me all of it would be done in a matter of days. When I've lived by myself all of my moving happened the day of the move. I would wait until the last possible moment and almost nothing ended up in boxes. I just threw as much as I possibly could in my vehicle so that I could not see and probably ended up breaking quite a bit of stuff.

The bigger furniture is something I'm sure everyone hates, and it is about as much fun as eating a bar of soap. No matter how many times I've moved couches, getting them in a doorway always seems to be like two five-year-old's trying to do chemistry. There is also always a person who tries to coach and navigate, and they are always more harm them good.

The cleaning is also about as much fun as chicken pox. No matter how hard I try to keep things clean, the house always needs a good bath right after everything is moved and who wants that detail?

The aftermath is also not pretty at all. After all the hard work of getting everything in, then comes putting it away which always turns into putting most of it into the garage or shed and letting it sit they're till the next move.

I'm hoping this move is the last for a really long time and need to think of how nice sitting on the deck will be instead of how hard it is going to be move my washer and dryer.