The never ending storage

Originally we had planned to head south just a couple days after the house closed, on Nov 27th. We actually left at 12am Christmas Eve morning, after working all of the 23rd. Why this long delay? I shall explain.

When most people move out of their house, they pack everything in boxes, rent a truck, load everything up, and unload at the new spot. Since we were planning on taking a trip, we decided instead to put all of our things into storage. Have you ever seen the sheer amount of crap one acquires after living in the same spot for 13 years? It's a lot. And most people don't have to store all of it.

That the unit we rented is 12x24, and about 20' high. Now you may wonder what we would do with all of that head room. No fear, we set up industrial strength steel pallet shelving (which is pretty impressive since we had to pick it up and dismantle it, haul it, and reassemble the whole thing all by ourselves), so that we actually have two additional "floors" on which to set stuff. A person can take a ladder up and walk on the top level. At least they could have, before we loaded it down. Now someone can squeeze up there to get at boxes, and that's about it. The whole thing was more like a storage mansion than anything else, and by the time we left, it was full. And that was AFTER we tossed and/or gave away most of our furniture, a third of our stuff, had a garage sale, and filled up the junk man's truck.

We had been planning our trip and the sale of our house for a long time, and the house was on the market for about 9 months, so we thought we were pretty well prepared for the actual move. We had already gotten the shelving in and filled the storage up at least 3/4 of the way with things we didn't want on our trip. When the house actually sold, my brother helped us take a u-haul full of our furniture out, so all that was left was anything left in the house the little that had been kept there while we were showing it. And the garage. (Or as I now refer to it, the dungeon of despair).

The day of closing we worked from sun up until 2am packing and loading our u-haul. I thought we were about 3/4 of the way done. I was wrong. Unfortunately, we had to be out by 11am the following morning. Let me just say that we didn't finish until 4am the NEXT morning. The hell that transpired in this period still gives me nightmares. I'm not even exaggerating - I still have hideous dreams that there's one room left to clean out.

Because of this, we decided to rent an additional storage unit to take just the stuff from the house to, because we had multiple trips to make, and our other storage was over 30 miles away. This unit was climate controlled and well let, and close to our hotel, so it would be easy to go through and pack for our trip. Actually everything about the unit was decent, except that the facility closed at 9pm, a fact I forgot in the horror of that day. It was fun arriving in the wee hours of the morning only to realize we couldn't get in, and having to unload that one the next day.

That 9pm time hindered us on several further occasions. You see, I thought it might take a good weekend to go through the unit. It didn't. We worked about 2 good weekends, plus four hours or so after work every day for two weeks straight. The good news is that we were both able to keep earning money during this time, the bad news is that a lot of it went towards the hotel bill. We only got enough out of the house to cover the costs of moving, and so there was no extra. For a whole week until we were paid, our food budget was a $10 bill my mom found in her purse. It's surprising how many meals we were able to get out of that from Cub.

Payday made things a bit easier, but there was one absolutely terrible night the day before my check arrived that my card was declined at the hotel, and they were fixing to kick us out. I have never been so scared in my life. Actually that's not true; the move was still worse. My mom had no money either and so we were definitely in a bind. Finally I pleaded with the hotel cashier and they gave me until the next morning to pay. My check was deposited first thing and we had no additional troubles staying at the hotel for the duration.

Nonetheless, we were eager to get out. Mom's job ended on Tuesday the 18th, and I made that my last day at work as well. We figured that we'd maybe have to do one more trip to our 30 mile away storage that evening as well as one the following day, and leave around noon on Wednesday. We checked out of the hotel for the last time. Kind of. It was a good dream and we made a heroic effort, but we also had a ton of errands to complete prior to our departure, like getting our driver's licenses changed, so we decided not to leave until Thursday. We checked back into the hotel that night, a little embarrassed, and out again the next morning. Curiously, though our errands were complete, we did not leave that day, either. The whole time was spent at storage, rifling through boxes, packing for our trip, throwing things out, adding to the "donate" pile, and freezing our hind ends off in the cold weather. We checked into the hotel that evening and out the next morning. Friday was basically a repeat of Thursday, except with much more despair and fear that we would never leave. Thankfully on Friday, we thought there was just one more load to take to our big unit, and then we could go.

Saturday was my 23rd birthday so we celebrated by having a lovely breakfast out on the way to our big storage. We still had another load to do but were otherwise ready to go.... or not. We ended up doing 3 trips that day with both cars, and oddly, there was still more to do. It was really a lovely way to spend my birthday, and it only got better. Around 5pm mom threw up and starting having a terrible fever. She had food poisoning from my birthday breakfast. We checked into the hotel that evening.

We of course couldn't continue that day, so we went back to the hotel and she slept and vomited a lot. I indulged in a little self pity but mostly tried to stay positive.

Sunday morning she was feeling better and we figured there was really only about one more load to take to our big storage. We checked out of the hotel and headed off. By the way - we always seemed to end up at this large unit after dark, and way out west like that, the wind just whisked through the prairie and under our clothes. It's a kind of cold you can't describe but to those who have experienced it. Anyway, we loaded up and off we went, in the day time for a change. I was already packed for the trip and had been for some time, and was mostly waiting on mom to get her stuff ready. And she did, bless her heart. We loaded up the LAST load to storage, which was only one car full, and she headed off alone while I continued to work and make a trip to goodwill.

By 7pm I hadn't heard from her for 3 hours and she wasn't answering her phone. I was really worrying and got ready to head out and see if she was all right, when I got a call from a number I didn't know. It was my dear mom, calling from a policeman's cell phone. She had gotten locked out of her running car at storage. The wind had blown the door shut. To make a long story short, she got back to our small storage at around 9pm. My car was packed and ready to go on the trip. We started packing hers.

Around 11pm I hit a new level of fear when we had about 6 more boxes of stuff to take than would fit in the car. Some boxes we unloaded the contents of and smashed into tiny corners of the car. Others we decided to dump completely, but of course there wasn't even a spot in the car to take it to the dumpster. So we strapped it on to the top in a sad pile and headed off to the nearest trash. One box fell off on the way.

By now it was midnight and we were finally ready to go. Determined not to spend another night in the hotel, we drove for about two hours until we were almost ready to fall asleep at the wheel. We stayed in the parking lot of a truck stop and I got positively the worst night of rest I've ever had. But at least we were gone.