Anderson in his new bedroom ...
As some of you may know, we recently purchased a home and have just moved in. Our timing was great ... a recent projection by Merrill Lynch says that we can expect the value of our home to decrease 25% in the next 2 years. Austin's real estate market is still doing fairly well so far ... we'll see how things go. Thankfully we bought a home for well below what we qualified for, so payments shouldn't be an issue. We hope.
Moving has been a pain. As a person who used to move from place to place frequently (I still think my friend Mike has a list of my 20+ old addresses in his address book ... gotta love the fact that accountants never throw anything away.) I've been used to throwing all of my belongings into an old, beat up subcompact car. After one or two trips, I used to be moved in. Now I'm older and have a wife and child, moving is much more complicated. Thankfully, I'm a physician now, so I'm much too important to move my stuff over in an old, beat-up subcompact car.
So I started by loading my old, beat-up compact car with my stuff.
This time around, it's taken about 10 carloads. And we hired movers to move the big stuff and hurt their backs instead of me hurting mine. I'm 40 years old now for god's sake ... I'll let the young guys have permanent back issues. If they hurt their backs badly enough they may be admitted to a hospital I work at and I could get back some of the money I spent to hire them. Sometimes you've gotta think outside the box.
Why move the 10 carloads ourselves? First, our house is about 4 miles from our apartment and it's not too bad to go back and forth. This also lets you move in slowly, which gives you time to mull over where to put things. I've done that a bit, with Natalie rearranging only half of what I did. This is a moral victory, as she typically rearranges 80% of what I do. And she's usually right, which makes it hurt all that much more.
Moving entails other issues, however. Our house was built in 1959 and much of the electrical system was not grounded. This can fry your computer equipment/television/anything that has computer circuitry. So we hired an electrician to put in grounded outlets at $65 per hour. Some 60-year-old 250 pound guy comes to the door, looks at the job and says "I'm going to have to crawl in the attic to get the job done." I'm picturing this guy plummeting through my ceiling and subsequently having to perform CPR on him, but I reluctantly agree and leave the house before he begins. Can't do CPR if you don't see the accident.
An hour later, he's still crawling around in the attic and it sounds like a large rodent has invaded the house. Occasional muffled curse words are overheard, but eventually he gets the outlets in. A smaller guy could have done it in 2 hours less time and saved me $130, but wouldn't have provided nearly as much entertainment. His insulation-ridden body descended from the attic after finding a tool he misplaced (again, worth the extra money for entertainment value alone) and he was gone.
Anyway, that's the beginning of the story. More about the move later.
