Time to move
It’s well-known that moving house is way up there on the stress scale. But one devotee of house-hopping is quite addicted to it
Does anyone have a piano better-travelled than mine? I’d bet good money they don’t.
This should mean I am the bane of removal men. They view pianos with sheer dread as the most unwieldy, slippery, hernia-inducing, hard-to-get-a-grip-on, defiant chunks of furniture in the whole sweaty business. And the bloody things also come armed with wheels causing them to skate around like an unwieldy, half-ton shopping trolley on the rampage.
I’ve moved house 10 times in as many years. That includes moves within Cyprus, within England and in between the two countries.
In that time, my beloved piano has travelled the seas between Cyprus and England four times. Removal men understandably hate my piano. Yet I flatter myself that they like its owner – if only because of the regular, lucrative business I give them.
Some people dread the thought of moving house; they say it is very stressful. Personally, I love it and do it often. But this can be somewhat problematic if, as I do, you live with someone who absolutely hates moving.
I can imagine how in some situations this combination could potentially lead to one of those other life-changing and major stressful events: divorce. The negativity generated, by those in my house who don’t enjoy moving – even though not all our moves have meant the family moved too – is the closest I have come to understanding what people mean by stress.
The constant criticism can be a tad wearing for even the most hardened and experienced house-movers. Nothing is ever right: the kitchen is too big, too small, facing the wrong direction, has the wrong kind of hob and there is never a right place to put the stereo and the TV. There are endless arguments about personal items of which there are always too many, even after the requisite de-cluttering that goes with the move.
And finally there is my piano, which is now an object of hate symbolising the trauma of moving house for all in the family who hate change.
The last three months have been particularly busy, even by my standards. Since mid-September, I have moved out of a house in London, sorting years of accumulated junk and prized personal possessions between storage and a new flat in the same area before moving to Cyprus. Within weeks we were moving out of the flat we already had here into a house with enough room for everything in the 20 foot container arriving from abroad as well as the already fully furnished four-bedroom flat.
Let’s not forget the piano. I think my biggest success with the latest move is actually finding a corner of the house where the piano is not constantly in your face, and it won’t bother family members who might be tempted to attack it with an axe.
The question is how to do all this and keep sane. It is entirely possible that you need to be a little less than sane in the first place to enjoy this sort of thing. Friends, no less, have told me that this constant moving is indicative of a deep-rooted psychological need for change, indicative of some sort of inner restlessness. In other words: if you can’t be happy in one place, you will never be happy with yourself anywhere.
I might respond that anyone who can countenance the idea of buying a house and living in it for the next forty years, or even worse, building one that is so perfect you can never justify selling it, must be incredibly dull. They could of course just be very happy people, who I am to judge? Suffice to say, they are not me, but then I was the kind of child who never took the same route to school two days running as I got easily bored.
People keep asking me, not least the removal guys, who have become old friends over the years; “Is this a permanent move this time then?”
I really do not know how to answer that question. It doesn’t have much meaning for someone who likes to move as often as I do. However, given my status as an accomplished mover, what I want to do here is to share some practical tips. If you really have to move house, I can understand that it can be a daunting prospect, particularly if you have been in one place a long time and every corner of the house is stuffed with items at least one person doesn’t want to part with. The good news is that there are ways to make it easier and if you plan well and do things in the right order, it can make the whole process easier and much more enjoyable.
The first thing, once you have decided to move and have got the removal guys to deliver your boxes, is to start to get rid of stuff. I always find a bit of de-cluttering very cathartic and often something that people find hard to do at other times. You can get in a professional mess therapist these days, but probably the cheapest and most effective way is to wait until the kids are out of the house, and preferably any partner with child-like tendencies at these sorts of times, invite a good friend round, open a bottle of wine and start packing.
As you pack the boxes to go, you also pack boxes to be chucked, given away to charity or just passed on to your mates. You need to be ruthless, which is why it is good to have a friend with you and a glass of wine to avoid any unnecessary sentimentality over items such as children’s toys and baby clothes that no-one has played with or worn for years. And naturally don’t take the kids to any second-hand sales for at least a year or you will only end up with them back again or tears all round.
Not that I always follow my own advice. Back in London in October for that leg of the moving process, I thought I had done a good job of de-cluttering when I managed to chuck God knows how many copies of Private Eye magazine and Socialist Worker newspapers from the 1980s, along with copies of every daily newspaper from the time of Thatcher’s downfall in 1990, the famous Blair Labour victory in 1997 and the death of Diana the same year.
When the boxes finally arrived at the new house in Cyprus in December, I found that I still had the agonising task of having to make room on book-shelves for far too many books and other assorted documents charting my life over the last twenty-odd years.
I finally opened files containing undergraduate philosophy essays I hadn’t read for years. It was a tough decision, but I had to wake up to the fact that my identity would not be shattered if I lost a few frankly quite embarrassing essays on the German existentialists, Aristotle and Marx. As William Morris said, everything in your house should be either useful or beautiful, or something along those lines and these essays were neither. I could have saved myself a lot of effort and possibly even some shipping costs if I had made this decision, two months earlier!
If you are renting rather than buying, moving is always much easier because they usually give you the keys as soon as you sign the contract. This means that while you have the luxury of two homes, you can go round and clean the new one ready to move stuff into, and you can also measure up and move a few things a bit at a time. You can also visit the house endlessly and plan where every piece of furniture, every book case and ornament is going to go. It is so easy to put loads of clothes in the back of your car and hang them straight into the appropriate wardrobe at the other end. It is also better to move precious ornaments, lamps and vases in the back of your car rather than packing them individually.
The other important thing to move yourself, if you can, is the kitchen. Why waste time packing up knives and forks and individually wrapping plates in tissue paper? They can as easily go on the back seat of the car and straight into the cupboards at the other end.
The advantage of this is that you also have an almost fully functioning kitchen when you get to the other end. There is nothing worse than getting to a new house on the big day and not being able to make a cup of tea because you can’t find a tea spoon or the sugar bowl. And if you have already stuck up the kids’ drawings and got the fridge magnets in your handbag ready to go straight onto the fridge when it arrives, it makes the new house seem more familiar. The whole move thing is then less traumatic for those individuals in the family that just hate change and will find any excuse for negativity in times of stress. I can guarantee this always helps.
Anyone who travels with hundreds of books in tow also needs to think carefully about the lay-out of your new house. This is incredibly important because even large houses don’t always have adequate wall space for book cases once you take account of radiators and French windows.
Houses with loads of windows always look great when the sun is shining in May and September but if you’ve got hundreds of books you need somewhere to put them. It is crucial to decide where they are going before you get to the new house and label each box carefully; the worst thing that can happen is paying guys loads of money to move heavy boxes only to find that all the book boxes for the downstairs book cases end up on the third floor! This happened to us when I had to fly back to London to pack my house up. Because the flight was late, the removal guys had already started packing the boxes before I got there. All I can say is: always give yourself enough time to pack the boxes yourself.
I went round to a friend’s house the other day to help her start packing up ready to move. The new house is slightly smaller than the current one, which is not ideal. We went to the new house to measure up and work out where all the furniture would go. I was impressed that she had been cutting and sticking large pieces of coloured paper in the shape of different items of furniture. This is a brilliant way of helping you visualise where everything in the new house will go.
It can’t help with the domestic arguments that inevitably ensue if you spend hours planning where to put everything and then the other people who are going to live in the house don’t agree. But it is definitely a lot easier moving pieces of paper round than paying removal guys to move the furniture around for hours on the big day.
Just make sure that everything has somewhere to go and that it is not too big to get into the new house if it doesn’t come apart. I left my friend with the thought that her massive four-poster bed (that doesn’t come apart) may be moved out of the current house with a fork lift, through the upstairs windows. We still haven’t worked out how it will be manoeuvred into the new one with a narrow staircase and no upstairs verandas and French doors!
