My last post was a little emotional and so it has taken me a while to get up the guts to do it again. I think I've moved beyond that emotional time and I"m ready to move on. So, yes, these next serious of posts will be post dated. Surprise, surprise.
When I was going through high school and college, one of the jobs I had during the summers was being a packer for Interstate Van Lines. I would go into work in my little blue work shirt, blue shorts, black hard toed shoes and a little Interstate Van Lines towel to wipe the sweat off my brow. The only way I remember this is because my mom saved all of this paraphanalia and thought it would be funny to wear it while the packers came to pack my house in OH. I didn't see the humor in it and just left it in the closet where it has lived happily for the past decade. Anyway, in order to take the job I had to go to "packing school" to learn how to pack up people's valuables so they would be transported from one place to another without breaking. I learned a lot there and that started my nack for being able to organize, pack, put together any large number of objects. I have since been known as "the packer" and when it comes to long trips where my van needs to be packed to the hilt with amazing amounts of junk, just let me handle it. So, when I was preparing for the packers to come pack our house, I had a little bit of insight into what they were going to be doing.
Sound funny, right?? I needed to prepare for someone to come pack my house. Take it from a former packer, if you expect to find anything at the other end, you might want to have as much of your stuff organized BEFORE they get there. One of the first things the packers did when they walked in our door was to start packing the kitchen. Now tell me, how logical is it to pack the one place that will still need to feed a family of five during the next 3 days before their move?? Good answer. Unfortunately, during that whirlwind of 2 big packers, lots of boxes and paper, I had to take the kids to a birthday party, so when they started packing the kitchen, I wasn't present. But when I had come back, anything that was on my counter, including my new favorite toy, the Hershey's Chocolate Maker (which, by the way, just takes Hershey's Chocolate Chips and melts them down to a nice warm temperature in a little chamber), was already packed in boxes. Since the kitchen got packed first, it was the first room they loaded on the van on the day we moved. Loaded on the front of a big 18 wheeler. To the tune of 23 boxes. And the rest of our house got loaded after that. So, when our shipment arrived in PA, the kitchen boxes were the last to come off. My poor mom, whom I had put in charge of unpacking my kitchen as soon as the boxes came off, waited from 8 AM when the truck arrived until 4:30PM for those stinking boxes to come off the truck!! Needless to say, she was a little tired from unpacking "busy" boxes and by the time the boxes actually came off that I really needed her to unpack -she didn't get very far into those 23 boxes.
One of the things that we desperately needed during that moving day was dishwasher soap, to operate our new dishwasher, and the dustbuster. By the time mom left to go back to VA, she had unpacked half of our 23 boxes. Tom and I spent the next day conquering what was left of the kitchen boxes. I was on a mission to find the two items I needed so I was like a driven animal unpacking that kitchen. As I opened each box and saw what was inside, I pictured where it came from in our old kitchen, hoping I would find the dustbuster first. But the dustbuster was hanging above the trashcan in our old house and everything else around it had been found. It could have been anywhere. Of course, my luck, wouldn't you know it, I found the dishwasher soap first and then, in the last box, I found the dustbuster. Out of the 23 boxes that were unpacked in the kitchen, it had to be in box number 23.
And now, on to my next reason why you need to be organized for your packers and pay attention as they are packing your house. My son has a bunk bed. He has slept in that bunk bed since he was 2. We bought that bunk bed and put it together in his room. I hasn't left since. Until we moved, that is. Apparently, it wasn't going to fit through the doors to be loaded onto the moving truck. They decided this very late in the afternoon of the day we moved. So, they took it apart, every board, screw and bolt they could, they took apart. Being that it was the last part of the afternoon of our move and his was one of the last rooms to get taken out of the house, I was ready for the move to be over and just didn't pay attention. That was, until, they unloaded all those pieces of wood in our new house in PA. One of the first things I was doing as our belongings came off the truck was to get everyone's bed and linens assembled and ready to go when that long day ended. As I started to see the end of all those pieces of the bunk bed coming off the truck, it slowly started to dawn on me, where on earth were all the screws and bolts?? Hmmmm???? One of the guys who packed the house, was also one of the guys who moved our house and traveled all the way to PA to unpack the moving truck. Surely he would know. He had no clue. We rummaged through Jake's dresser and every box that came into his room. No parts. I racked my brain for the last things that were packed and loaded on the truck, found those boxes and rummaged through them. Nothing. The one packer/mover even called the company to contact the guy who had actually taken Jake's bed apart to find out where he might have stashed the bolts. Couldn't reach him. By then, I was whipped and just couldn't exert the energy anymore. We decided, for Jake's first night, that he would just sleep on his mattresses. I found all his sheets and comforters and pillows and set them up for the poor boy. He was very sad that everyone else had a set up bed in their new house and not him. Bright and early the next day, we made a trip to Home Depot and bought make shift pieces so his bed could be put together. The bed went together nicely and had no problems adapting to the new pieces. But I was the one having the problem trying to figure out this puzzle. Where on earth did the pieces end up?? As the days went by and we came into the first week of being in our new home, the boxes slowly started to disappear. With the exception of the basement, all of the boxes were unpacked within the first 2 weeks. Yeah, me!!! Still, no pieces to Jake's bunk bed. I even started working on some of the basement boxes, recognizing that some of them were junk boxes and had things thrown in them from several combinations of rooms. Things that had not fit in the boxes from that room being packed or things that had just simply been forgotten. Nope, not in any of those boxes. I finally gave up my quest after a few weeks and just figured it was a casualty of moving.
Soon after that, my dad was coming up to help with some shelves in our house and I was getting ready for his visit. I was straightening up the inside of the house and had gone outside to switch the sprinklers around on our newly sprouting lawn. Since we moved in, I hadn't touched any of the yard toys that had come off the moving truck - the slide and the kids sand box. They had just been thrown in the back and stayed there since that day. I decided to finally deal with these and find a spot, where I didn't care if the grass was growing or not, and put them away. I started with the sand box and had to unload the toys from it in order to move it. As I started to pull some of those toys out, wouldn't you know it, but there were those da*n screws. They had been wrapped up in a huge ball of tape and just tossed in the sand box. The sand box. Yep, the sand box. That was definitely my next logical place to look for the screws to my son's bunk bed.
So, if there is one thing I want to leave with you as you leave my blog today, it is this - One, whenever you move and have packers, stay organized. And two, if you can't find that one particular item once you arrive in your new house, check the sand box.
