I feel your pain. My effort to downsize (sorting, donating, and discarding inherited items) turned into a process that lasted almost 2 years. My house took longer to sell than expected, and lots of things went into storage for staging, painting, and patching. Unfortunately, the final items slated to be donated in March had to be dumped, because all local charities shut down due to coronavirus concerns.
Due to injury, packing was done badly to say the least. On moving day (4 weeks ago), I discovered that the storage unit supposed to be part of the deal was non-existent. As a result, there’s a lot more stuff than I’d planned to have in every room. So, unpacking is going to take a while. I try to focus on functional items (over decorative ones) and avoiding re-injuring myself.
One day, I hope to look back on the moving day pictures I took of “peak chaos” and laugh. In the meantime, I have the real estate listing “before” images of empty rooms to use as a goal (and requests to “see” my new place). Thank goodness for fake videoconferencing backgrounds!
We were able to slowly move things into the apt a week before we had to move out of the old place and also had an extra week after the big move to continue moving things, it really made things less stressful and easier on my back (we did hire movers for the big and heavy stuff). I’m really not looking forward to whatever future move i have to do
Lucky you! My move was 48 hours of hell, with professional movers who threw in the towel on loading the truck after seven hours of doing four flights of stairs at my old place. By the time the real estate paperwork was done, they told me it was impossible to unload everything by 5PM, set up my bed, and left to store everything until the next day.
After that, two of us spent half the evening moving what remained at my old place taking turns filling up our cars and driving back and forth until about 10PM. The movers came back at 8AM the next day, and finished around 4PM. Hopefully, that was the last move I will ever make.
You have to start by not caring. Then continue to not care. Then one day you care, but it’s too much work. Then you care, and are ready to accept the amount of work it’ll take, you just need one more episode/minute on phone/beat the level/finish the chapter.
Then one glorious morning, you wake up, and realize you’ve lived yourself right into an utter shithole. And you get to work.
I found the video inspirational. I’m glad for him that he got his place cleaned up, and that he felt well enough to tackle it. And I’m glad that he posted a video for us to see it being done.
Its possible he thought of the whole timelapse concept as a way to motivate himself to get it gone, which if true is a pretty clever way to shift one’s perception of cleaning up a space.
