Black bag job

If you want to assess how good or bad a particular moving experience is – all you need to do is look at the moving boxes. When people schlep their stuff from place to place, what they use to do it says a lot about how things are going.

In our case, our boxes chart a kind of life cycle.

In the beginning we had new boxes.
They were purchased in bulk. Two sizes, with packing paper and a tape gun. Sharpies were always available, and were used to write detailed descriptions of their contents.

Things like:

Kitchen. Pottery & drinking glasses. Fragile. This side up.

This would be written on more than one side of the box, so that some label would be visible when the box had things stacked on it.

Subsequent boxes in this happy stage would be similarly labeled, before being lovingly stacked in nice straight columns.

That was last week.

With the deadline for getting out of the house fast approaching, expedience trumped any desire for clear labeling.

Kitchen stuff
Cmp Rm
Flurgen Blurg

Break it if you want, who cares which side is the top and we might have copied the label onto the side – maybe.

In due course, the packing paper was used up – we began using newspaper, plastic bags, bath towels, and finally - loose clothing from the floor.

Then the box supply ran out.

Not to worry. Since we are moving things to the apartment as well as storage – any box at the apartment can be reused.

These boxes already had labels, so these must now be changed:

Kitchen. Pottery & drinking glasses. Fragile. This side up.

Becomes

Kitchen. Pottery & drinking glasses. Fragile. This side up.
Bks

Usually when moving, you miss the odd item or two. When this occurs repeatedly in room after room, it becomes impossible to group and box similar items together:

Computer To Apt Shoe, Garden tools, Blender parts

Shortly after this happens – there is a realization that labeling boxes that are destined for the apartment (which will be emptied and re-used) is less than essential:

Random Crap. Apt.

Then the packing tape runs out. Undoubtedly more is available (we certainly remember buying more) but it cannot be located.

Speed!

There is a brief period of tucking box tabs under each other to "close" boxes – but this only lasts until the looming deadline of date-we-must-be-out crystallizes in our minds.

We shift to plastic tubs.

They'd been used since the beginning – but we'd held onto the illusion that what was put in them would STAY in them much longer than we had with the boxes.

Now, we dump out the tubs and the apartment and lug them back to the house. These tubs have labels on them – carefully written on masking tape:

LittleBean's toys. To Apartment.

Since the tubs are now filled with hangars and unmatched shoes – we peel off the tape.

Despite their size, the tubs are soon overwhelmed by the volume of crap. Their size also makes them quite heavy.

We move to garbage cans.

I've yet to be involved in a move that has not reached the stage when stuff is unceremoniously dumped into garbage cans to "pack" it.

Appliances, more shoes and (put a bullet in my head now)- wire hangars.

As only a few garbage cans in any house have real size, they are filled up almost immediately. One (the recyclable bin in the garage) has been sitting in the 18-degree weather for days and shatters as it is being picked up.

Side note: Only GIANT IDIOTS move in the wintertime.

Addendum: We'll be moving again in February or March.

At this stage we have abandoned boxes, tubs and random plastic containers and have arrived at the crack cocaine of moving containers: the black plastic trash bag.

Now, anyone with a few minutes could reel off a list of reasons to never use trash bags in packing:

• They break open
• Pointy things poke through them
• They do not stack
• People might mistake a full trash back for (duh) trash and act accordingly
• They break open

At this stage, there are no minutes to consider these facts. The thought process resembles this:

Crap. Need thing to carry it. Bag! More crap. Put in bag!

-and so on.

Net result of all of this is an abomination of items stuffed into the back of a mini van to the point that (when you finally open the door) it vomits out onto the pavement like the extra-chunky result of a pub crawl.

Plus some of it was fragile (lucky it was already in a garbage bag, eh?)

This takes care of the stuff you wanted to keep.

Now for the stuff you wish you'd never owned in the first place.

1-800-GOT-JUNK is step one. Point at it and it disappears. Yes, you have to write them a check, but this late in the game- you're practically hugging the guy as he takes away the plastic faux-closet and pressboard desk.

Cha-ching. Vroom. Gone.

What remains are the move's problem children: hangars, old curtain rods, toxic chemicals, paint, a propane tank, and a VAST selection of loose and unidentified objects.

The truly toxic items will get routed for proper disposal; the empty propane tank gets stuffed into a storage container.

And the rest?

Black. Plastic. Bag.

Old glass vases, empty storage jars, a ferocious tangle of hangars are shoved into bags. When those bags split, their ruptured carcasses are themselves stuffed into bags.

Tomorrow is trash day, but the legal trash bin is full to overflowing and the bag count is dangerously close to landfill territory.

Layer the minivan in cardboard – everything goes in the back.

An hour of slinging and flinging and the van is packed solid. There are no sightlines behind the driver seat – but it's all in the van.

It's night. It's butt-cold and I have a van full of garbage and recyclables.

Hit it.

--

I've groused about rentals before, and I'm sure I will again – but there is one thing rental complexes have that makes the current situation bearable:

Unlocked dumpsters.

I am sure no resident would be allowed to unload this much garbage if they asked – so I'm not asking.

Pull into the underground parking, wheel the dumpster over to the van. Fling fling, fling. I'm blocking the entrance, I'm wondering if they have surveillance, I'm trying to think of what I'll say if they watch me throw a 40lb bag of mulch into the dumpster.

No one shows. I push the bin back to its original position and leave no trace I was ever there (well, except for the 40 bags of garbage).

My back feels like it's been beaten with a pipe – but the house is all but empty.

Cue the Mission Impossible theme – I was never here.