...transport of same to a temporary storage place via borrowed vehicle (thanks again, Marco!)...
...and then the boxing up of the apartment itself.
It wasn't an emotional experience, just a trying one. No surprise to those who have done this sort of thing before, but sorting and packing are mutually exclusive activities. We did our best, but it is so much easier to take it all than to make decisions. What surprised me, though, was just how much all was.
It wasn't an emotional experience, just a trying one. No surprise to those who have done this sort of thing before, but sorting and packing are mutually exclusive activities. We did our best, but it is so much easier to take it all than to make decisions. What surprised me, though, was just how much all was.
We rented the house we did in part because it offered a lot of storage: closets galore, the shed out back, a garage with lots of shelving. I thought it was enough storage. In fact, I was so over-confident that when my landlady mentioned I was welcome to store stuff in the second of her two garages (roughly one quarter of the entire volume of the house we share is garage) I thanked her but assured her we wouldn't need it.
How wrong I was. Here's the truck that brought our worldly possessions:
Needless to say, it's shown here towards the end of the unloading process. By this point our living room, bedroom, hallway, garage, and, yes, second garage were all pretty well filled. I wrote previously about the danger of flooding here in California: we are, for sure, inundated.
The timing of the delivery couldn't have been better though. I needed ski clothing for a trip starting Thursday; the truck arrived with the necessary woolens on Wednesday. Unpacking it took two hours: the truck showed up minutes after Felix fell asleep for his afternoon nap. Best of all, Talia's parents came through town some days after the truck and took the boy off our hands just long enough to allow us to process it all, or the bulk of it anyway.
In the end, having unboxed and reboxed, having sorted and discarded, having, in a word, organized, it's not that bad. The shed is full of dishes and cooking kit that will have to await a future home, also most of what came from Ons Buiten (Talia's beloved push-mower, my beloved Amsterdam city garbage can, our bright yellow stembus, a large box of miscellaneous schuurtje-weet-ik-niet-wat) and a lot of packing material. One closet is full of clothing and cloth we don't need to see again for a long time. Another contains four huge boxes of baby stuff. Our wood storage now holds books, and another nine boxes of no doubt priceless volumes now forms a sort of shelf in our kitchen (doesn't makes sense on paper, so to speak, but it works). Our most precious possession, the stained glass windows, arrived without a scratch and is safely stored (well packed Marije!). Our walls are adorned.
To be done: sorting and storing of personal papers and effects. To be done, to be done.
And the second garage? Nitrous apparatus, Japanese cabinet, Dutch bikes. Not bad.
I feel like crap now because I don't have a garage. Where's MY American dream? Where did I go wrong? I should have been a doctor like my dad wanted. Then I too would have a garage. Alas! Alack! What a waste my life has been! Better that I'd never been born than to live - nay, exist, garageless, as I do. (Okay, that's laying it on a bit thick. You did have me jonesing for a garage tho. For a minute.)
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