LAST FRIDAY AND YESTERDAY, I began to discuss my recent move from a Belltown apartment to a Pike-Pine Corridor condo.
If I ever rewrite my old list of ways to voluntarily complicate your life, I’d have to put “move to a new home” right up at the list’s top, next to “start taking heroin.”
I’d previously mentioned that during my starving-student and starving-graduate days, I’d lived in approximately 20 locations over a course of 10 years, including one stretch of nine addresses from June 1981 thru July 1984. That constant hassle left me pretty much wary of the whole process.
So when I got into a Belltown apartment that was soon taken over by the semi-subsidized Housing Resource Group (which meant rent increases were far below the prevailing market trends), I sat and stayed for a comfy nine years.
But the time came at last to get the heck outta Belltown and into a home of my own. It could’ve gone far easier than it did.
First step: Getting two weeks ahead in the ol’ online column, knowing my life (including my Net access) would be screwy for at least that long.
Second step: Boxing up everything, and throwing away everything else. As a devoted collector of pop culture’s ephemera and detrius of all types, this posed severe questions of what was worth carting and what deserved trashing. (Eek! The Cat toys: Keep. Ken Griffey Jr. cereal boxes (empty, no collector resale value): Dump.)
Third step: Arranging the move of my mail, phone, electric account, cable, bank statements, and especially DSL service.
Fourth step: Getting new furnishings for the new space, instead of the hobble of donated and Dumpster-saved items that had furnished the old space. Because the new space had one large room (plus a separate kitchen and bathroom), I knew I’d want a separate bed space. To conserve square footage, I chose to get a loft bed.
Fifth step: Arranging with my brother the naturopath and a pal of his to rent a U-Haul van and get everything on it, then off of it, within a time frame amenable to both of them and also to the management of my new building. This became the first impossibility. The brother’s friend could only get out of work and to my old space after 6:30 p.m. The management at the new space had a policy forbidding move-ins from starting after 7 p.m.
The result: Two and a half hours of loading all my belongings (except the furniture-to-be-trashed) into the van, which would then be parked overnight at the brother’s place in Wallingford. I was left overnight at the old space with nothing but the clothes on my proverbial back, the contents of my trusty shoulder bag, the contents of my old refrigerator, and the to-be-trashed old furniture.
The brother tried to put a positive-yet-ironic spin by saying the night of stufflessness would be “an adventure. It’ll be like being homeless.”
Actually, it was a case of having two homes, and nothing in either of them.
TOMORROW: The last of this for now, I promise.
IN OTHER NEWS: Burger King suddenly quit its promo campaign for the movie Chicken Run, in which viewers were encouraged to “save the chickens” by eating more beef. Replacing the ads: New spots, which look very hastily-prepared, selling chicken sandwiches.
ELSEWHERE:
