Worst Wednesday on Record

Okay, so I’ll go ahead and post all about last Wednesday, July 26th, which was hands-down the worst Wednesday I’ve ever experienced in my life. It was the day the last of our stuff arrived in SC from NJ. The day started out well enough – I popped over to the library to print out a few copies of my resume and also responded to a couple job ads I found online. I got a call early in the morning from the moving co. stating that he’d be at our apartment at 10:30 a.m. that morning. I got home at 10:15 a.m. and by 12:30 p.m. there was no truck in sight. Unable to delay any longer, I went over to the U-Haul facility and signed the paperwork for the truck I had reserved. Once back at the apartment the moving truck finally arrived.

It was now easily at least 95 degrees with not a cloud in the sky. The heat was unrelenting. Our babysitter arrived at 1 p.m. and immediately Denis and I got to work. We unloaded our possessions, with some going into the apartment and some going onto the U-Haul to then be taken to storage. Within 10 minutes I was exhausted due to the heat. God bless Denis, he kept on going with barely a pause in activity, while I suffered and drank fluids and attempted to keep up. We put several large items on the U-Haul and opted to take it over to storage before filling it up too much.

A few days earlier we had signed up for an extra storage unit because our original unit was full. This new unit was on the opposite side of the complex, and we quickly dumped the items into the unit – mattresses, the fridge (which suffered scratches from the dresser we placed on it AND had a shattered glass shelf that broke during transit), and a few other large items. Back to the apartment we went, downing juice, water and Gatorade on the ride over.

By 4:30 p.m. or so we were drenched in sweat, covered in dirt, and barely able to function. Our babysitter called in a backup to take over with the kids since she had to go to work. We told the new babysitter that we were taking the last of our stuff to storage and would be back as soon as we were done. We headed over to the storage unit and I was disgusted to find a trail of ants heading right into our storage unit. A trail of ants that had NOT been there 2 hours before when we dropped off the first of our stuff. I was horrified and furious. And hot and sweaty. And tired and sore. For the next two hours Denis and I unloaded a very full U-Haul and tried to get it all into the storage unit.

At some point I said to Denis, “Uh, I think I have to throw up.” I severely slowed down my efforts to help and walked around the corner of the building. And promptly threw up five times in a row. Fortunately it was all water and juice since I hadn’t eaten much that day. After rinsing my mouth out with water I went back to work helping Denis. We had to put some of the stuff in the original unit because we ran out of room, so we loaded stuff back into the U-Haul truck and made our way over to the other unit. Which had NO ants, by the way. As we were moving our 37″ tv off the truck we dropped it – it landed with a bounce. Denis laughed and said, “Well, it’s a good thing we made a lot of money on the sale of the house because this means I’m buying myself a nice flat-screen, wall-mounted television once we buy a house.” I told him I had no problem with that since I royally messed up with this move.

In the end we finished around 8:30 p.m. – a full 7 1/2 hours of working in the heat and humidity. I kept apologizing to Denis over and over again for the big mistake of not having professional movers do everything. I told him that he can never forgive me enough for the hassle that I caused simply trying to save a buck.

I’ve learned my lesson. ONLY USE FULL-SERVICE MOVERS. There is a good reason why they cost so much – they do all the hard work. What sucks is that in all my attempts to save money on this move, it ended up costing the same as if we had used a full-service moving company. This because we had to hire two services because the first one underestimated the space we needed, and because we had to hire a few U-Hauls along the way to transport stuff from storage unit to house or truck to storage unit. Most of our furniture is scratched in some way, or dented, or broken. An entire box of my Fiestaware is broken. Who knows what else was broken in the move – we’ll find out once we’re in a house this fall.

A house for which I will use a full-service moving company to get into. And then I will bug-bombed the entire contents of the house (twice) to ensure that those damn ants don’t follow us from storage and the apartment into the new house.