What do you think is the worst aspect of moving?

I hate packing. I get depressed every time we move. I feel like I’m being pulled up by my roots.
I love decorating and renovating the new place but I always feel so displaced.

ALL of it. It’s like having a baby with no drugs. I swear I’ll NEVER do that again. But two more kids later….

Waiting on all the service people especially cable to finally get to your home to hook things up.
I love the time line they give you. “Our person will be there anytime between 8 and 5.”

The whole experience is unsettling, more so as we age and become less flexible and more dependent on routine and home comforts.

I can think back over the years to the family treasures that were broken during a move; never the movers’ fault, however, since they listed every nick and crack (even the invisible ones) on on every piece of china, glassware and porcelain.

@chyna: Consider yourself lucky if the service guy comes even in the broad time range he mentions. Often (very often) he underestimates the time it takes to do the job, and runs over, and over and over, thus dragging his schedule into tomorrow (and tomorrow and tomorrow).

(I’ve never HAD a mover. I did it all myself with help for the big stuff.)

@Dutchess_III, We moved into the most prestigious neighborhood in our town and the neighbors must have been afraid as they saw what must have looked like the Beverly Hillbillies moving in as we did it all ourselves. Those neighbors were always really snobby. Even though we probably had more money than most of them they always looked down their noses at us. We were the only people on our end of the block that had kids.

I haven’t moved for almost six years, but in the decades before that I moved many, many times—across cities, across states, and state to state. Each move was harder than the previous ones, because I had accumulated more stuff. I hated packing—always more stuff than I thought I had—and when I could, I paid the movers to also do the packing.

The hardest moves I made were the times I couldn’t afford packers and/or movers, and the easiest was when my company relocated me to another state and paid for the movers and the packers. In fact, the same company did that several times for me.

The next time I move, I’ll be the one packed in a box.

Having to part with things that aren’t worth moving. Dealing with the moving company. Having to unpack things that are damaged. Having to do the deep clean on the place you’re leaving, and the place you’re moving into. Having to buy new stuff, even if you were totally equipped in the last place… because every new place has something missing. Having to squeeze everything you normally fit into your schedule into the time you have left over from dealing with the move. Realizing that every time you do this, you have less energy and enthusiasm for it, which makes you feel older.

@glacial So very true. All of it.

I enjoy settling into and nesting in a new place but I hate, hate, hate uprooting from an old place.

@Pachyderm_In_The_Room Not packed in a trunk?

@chyna Yeah, I bloody detest that too. It’s like, okay, thanks man, now I have to miss a day of work because I don’t know when during the day the Internet guy is coming to hook my shit up.

What I hate the most is things that get inexplicably lost, or when something breaks. Both always seem to happen to me every time I move. :/

@Symbeline I just threw out the portable mixer that I lost one of the beaters from in the last move before this one! I figured if it hadn’t turned up in two years, it was gone for good.

LOL, @janbb. I do, in fact, carry my trunk everywhere I go.

Imagining it won’t take all that long to pack then, finding out it can take weeks of exhausting work, lugging boxes around and discovering you had so much more stuff than you ever realized. Then theft and losing things; nice things.

When the company moves us, the worst part is finding a place to move into. First we have to rent until we find the right house to buy. Selling the house we are leaving is always a hassle as well. The last move it took nearly a year, with Hubby living in a studio rental in the new city and son and I living in the old house, 300 miles away.

I can’t decide between packing or unpacking. I still have boxes we haven’t unpacked since we moved years ago. One day I plan to go through the boxes and give the stuff away.

Physically: I have a lot of books. Packing up all my books is a pain, because I like to pack them up neatly and orderly. However, last time I moved, I literally threw all of my clothing into garbage bags and put them in the truck.
Mentally: I’ve moved around a lot, so I’ve never gotten the chance to make strong connections with people. Mentally the hardest part for me is trying to reframe my mind so that I go to a place with an open mind and not just long for home.

I don’t like the physical loading and unloading into a car/truck part of it. Otherwise I enjoy it, it’s a good time to purge of the things you no longer need/use, and decorating a new house is a blast for me, having a new feng shui if you will.

Man. You pick up boxes and put them down. Pick them up and put them down. Pick them up and put them down. It gets to the point where you pick up a box….and have no idea why you just did that, so you put it back down in the same place.

Looking into the empty rooms of the old house one last time.

And hearing the echos of the laughter, the kid’s footsteps on the stairs, the time I made macaroni noodles for the first time (had no idea they expanded!).....

All of it sucks.

@woodcutter, I remember the last time I walked through my moms house, the one I grew up in, the one stable thing in my life. I cried like a baby but there was no way she could even get sround that house anymore, much less keep it up. Sad sad day.

@Judi I felt the same way when we sold my moms house. It was my childhood home and she had lived there 55 years.

I always knew that no matter what happened I would have a place to go home to. On that day I realized the roles had switched and I was now the one making sure mom would never be homeless.