Moving Day

Note: We Moved on the weekend of December 3. I was going to add the next week and then this week, since we're still setting up - though everyone has a room fixed up but me through no fault of my own - more on that later but I realised if I waited to find the time for that it would never happen. And so, here is an account of our moving weekend.

Cast of Characters

Sacha – erstwhile partner in crime, capoierista, physicist, overall genius and general moving organiser. She who called the removalists (moving company), the apartment, had the electricitiy and internet transferred over, checked with the real estate, etc. etc.

Lisa – my super athletic super strong new housemate who impressed the movers with her agility. Also a championship olympic mountain biker and a barista. Capable of carrying large objects on her own and although I would love to say leap buildings in a single bound, I don’t think its possible.

Andrea – my temporary leichhardt housemate who got roped into moving by virtue of the fact that she’s staying in Kartini’s room for a few weeks. In another life, an aspiring journalist who works for the wakely foundation.

Kartini – the absentee housemate who is temporarily in Indonesia for her annual Christmas visit/nose operation. Packed up everything in the house that she could before she left and left everyone with instructions stuck to their door. Owner of most of the furniture.

Scott – kartini’s boyfriend who came by to help, stayed the whole day and ended up carrying furniture despite having gotten home at 5am on the same day

Matt & Ed – the movers who ended up staying almost 7 hours instead of the previously agreed 3 despite having slept only 2 hours the night before.

Me – the other housemate, who surprised self by being able to carry things without hurting self (we’ll leave that to the next day, when unpacking), generally organised person who thought of dinner and channeled her inner domestic helper by cleaning the bathroom immediately after arrival in new home…

The Moment I Wake Up…I Say a Little Prayer for You.

Saturday morning I woke up and went to work. The day before Lisa and I had moved some stuff including her bikes to the new house. This was the first time Lisa had seen it and so far she was impressed by the courtyard and the potential of the place. We dumped everything in the living room. We also got some stuff from my place in Leichhardt and had lunch at the Mezzapica, my corner café where I said bye to the friendly barista dudes that run the place.

Our new house is a two story structure at the corner of Arundel and Ross in Glebe. If you cross our street you get to Paramatta Road, the major thoroughfare that heads Northwest and if you cross that you get to my university right away. It’s a good location but unless you can live with cars speeding by, its not the place for you. Fortunately thanks to my adventures in Cebu sharing with 7 girls in a 3 bedroom apartment in a building right on the city’s major thoroughfare I can sleep through everything – except snoring, but that’s another story.

There are 4 bedrooms and one bathroom on the top floor. Since the house is shaped more like a rectangle and is long rather than wide, the bedrooms are irregularly shaped. Mine is at the front of the house and is somewhat trapizoidal except its stretched lengthwise. The ground floor has a living room, a front parlor, a kitchen, a side hallway and a courtyard which everyone fell in love with when we first came. There are two patches of plants - I say patches because literally they are in the corners of one side of the courtyard – and a lot of space to leave out chairs. We are planning to fix this up and possibly hold dinner parties, which would be great.

Sacha had called the movers and arranged for them to be at my house in Leichhardt at 230pm. She would then meet me there and we would head over to King Street, where I had been staying for the week while my house was abandoned with no furniture. I got a call from my old housemates saying that they were at the house cleaning so I headed over to Leichhardt early, around 1ish to help out and organise the stuff. Ended up having to have the keys copied as I couldn’t find my keys – the King St apartment was in such a mess that Im sure I’ll find it in some box somewhere. They took the keys because the realtor wanted them back by the afternoon so Sacha and I had to get into the house via the back door when we got back from our gelati snack.

It turns out the movers had a 3 hour window to arrive but we didn’t find this out till we found their number and gave them a call. Matt, the mover called Sacha at 230 to tell her they’d be there at 330 but they didn’t get to us until 4. Fortunately my stuff was easy to pack since I didn’t have so much so we were on our way to Sacha’s at around 5. The movers were very friendly and helpful. We helped them out a bit by carrying stuff. My housemates also left some stuff outside the house that was supposed to have been picked up but was left behind for anyone to get.

Sacha: So can we ride in the truck with you
Matt: Well, we can only fit three people in the cab, but there’s a bit of a back space there so (turning to me) we can put a blanket on the back and you can sort of lie there, its up to you.
Me: I guess I’m taking the bus!!!

So while Sacha rode in the giant truck I took the ever absent 370 which meant I had to wait for at least 15 minutes to get a ride. When I got there they had locked one elevator – Sacha got the key from the building administrator – for our exclusive use to move. We also pretty much kept using the 2nd as we had to keep going up and down. In the meantime Scott & Andrea had gone to the house to drop off some stuff for the first round of “things that can be moved in the car”. The strategy was like this. We kept taking stuff out of the house and we left it in the hallway. Sacha & Dominic (her canadian french polish friend who helped out for a few hours, also a physicist) put them in the elevator, took them down and helped the movers take them out to the truck, which was parked in a side street that was three buildings away.

This took quite a while because we had to carry down boxes and loads of furniture, like 2 couches and a couple of beds. I took Sacha’s bed apart myself and found the longest nails I had ever seen in my life, as long as my middle finger (Go IKEA!). Andrea dismantled Kartini’s bed and we had to wait for the movers to dismantle Lisa’s, which was a four poster monstrosity that she inherited from a former occupant. It had an antique looking ornate headboard and both bed posts reached almost to the ceiling. It was huge and heavy and could only be taken out of the building via the fire exit down seven floors. Rick, the original owner of the bed was going to pick it up in a few weeks but in the meantime we would have to move it as there was no way to keep it in the apartment.

Lisa arrived from work around 6 and by then Andrea and Scott had loaded up the car for another go. I remembered that it as time for dinner so I went out and grabbed them fish and chips while I got Sacha and me Japanese food. By then Lisa had made another run to the house (“you should see the living room, they just dumped everything in it!”) and when she got back we had just finished dinner. Andrea and Scott left and I went with Lisa in search of a smoothie and we arrived at Boost juices exactly a minute after they closed!!! (evil!) We ended up with these wonderful Lassis from a North Indian restaurant instead. I had mango and she had rose they were nice rich and creamy and dare I say healthy?

By around 8 or 9 we were on our last legs. All that was left was moving the stuff from the elevator to the truck and then taking the white goods – fridge, washing machine and Sacha’s giant IKEA wardrobe from the apartment downstairs, which the movers would do with their special equipment. Andrea left for the house early for a prior commitment, and the rest of us decided to move as much as we could from the house to the truck. We made an attempt to get one of the bed frames down the fire escape but then decided to wait for the movers. That damn thing was heavy as hell.

Lisa and I moved various bits of random furniture like chairs and tvs – Lisa carried both tvs by herself both times totally impressing the movers who later told Sacha that they couldn’t believe she did it herself (Lisa is about five feet tall) .

Me: Lisa, I’ll take that chair. You can take that tv.
Lisa: I already took the other tv. Does everyone think Im superman?
Me: But the other tv was bigger than this one.
Lisa: Was it? Oh okay. (Picks up giant tv and runs out the door)

Now to get to the truck we pass 2 restaurants (Urban bites, which is an open air café and Thai Land which is a thai sit down on the floor restaurant with clear glass windows all around) and an apartment building. By the time we got to carrying the queen size mattress, not an easy feat since we’re both pretty short, the people in Thai Land had stopped eating to watch us. When we got to the first bed frame, which Sacha, Lisa and a very helpful chinese guy had managed to get down the fire escape, the people at Urban Bites were enjoying the show. The movers got the rest of the stuff down and Scott helped us carry the last of the stuff.

When we got to the house it was a mess. How the movers managed to get Sacha’s giant wardrobe up our narrow stairs is beyond me. We left the giant bedframes in the hallway next to the stairs and pretty much started organising what we could. The entire removal service, which I feel was well worth it because there was no way we could have rented a truck and done all that ourselves cost about six hundred bucks. Which meant that by the end of the weekend we were all pretty much momentarily broke, given the other expenses.

The first thing I did was fanatically clean the bathroom because I believed that everyone deserved a good shower in a nice clean bathroom. Then we started moving some of our things upstairs. The movers had already put in the mattresses so pretty much everyone slept on a mattress that night. We brought up all our bedposts and slats, some boxes and a few miscellaneous furniture along with suitcases. I think we got to bed around one, after hanging around a bit on the living room on whatever available surface we could find – which wasn’t much.

The bathroom turned out to have this kind of glass covering the window that wasn’t see through but was enough for you to see someone’s shilouette which was why when Lisa and I first arrived we could see the outline of Andrea in the light. In the end we taped up good old Bob – my sarong from puerto galera with the king of ganja himself – over the window just to serve as a block until we got a shower curtain, which by the way we still don’t have 5 days later.

My Inner Domestic Helper

I think it would please my mother to know that despite her constant nagging and my apparent inattention I have learnt quite a few domestic things, one of which is to always clean things such as shelves and drawers before you put stuff in them, to use lining to protect the cutlery and generally keep things clean. My room may not be the oasis in the middle of chaos but I am rather fanatical about certain things such as dishes, glasses and the bathroom.

Which is why I decided on Sunday to attack the kitchen. Sacha and Lisa left early to clean the other apartment and because the Leichhardt house was already clean it was my turn to tidy up the new house. Andrea gave herself a much needed break and went off to the beach at manly, later coming back with a patch of red on her back on the space where her tankini ended and her bottoms began where she forgot to put suntan lotion.

I spent 7 hours cleaning the kitchen. I discovered that we had 6 packs of the same kind of flour. A bazillion spoons, forks and knives from the time sacha bought utensils thinking there was none in the house, three different packs of cinammon spice, 2 basils, 2 oreganos and a lot of exotic Indian spices (Kartini is of Indian descent) that I could never identify. There was also at least one of each kind of rice. White Long Grain. White Medium Grain. White Short Grain. Brown Medium Grain. You get the drift.

My frustration was that I didn’t see the point in having multiple things of the same kind also we didn’t have enough space. I had also stepped out to buy lining paper – even butcher’ s paper would have done – but every store I went to said they didn’t have anything like that. The guy at Kmart even said, I know what you mean but we don’t have it. I have lined our shelves with flowered wrapping paper and the wooden counters with red cellophane paper. It being Christmas, that was the only color available at Go Lo.

I also fanatically loaded up the dishwasher and it took 3 rounds before it managed to wash everything, not counting all the plastic tupperware type things that are still on the dish rack due to lack of space. I also cut my right pointer finger on an eating knife while I tried to remove it from the plastic it was in consequently resulting in a whole lotta blood.

I am proud to say that when I was done the kitchen looked pretty nice and neat. And impressive too. Andrea was so amazed when she got home given that it was all fixed up sans the bazillion boxes that formerly covered the floor.

We had dinner on Glebe Point Road, which is the closest major restaurant road where I had this yummy chorizo pasta thing and took take out dessert at Home café (horrible food, excellent dessert) before crashing at home.