Packers and Movers

Before last week, I hadn't given much thought to the difference between packers and movers.  In fact, I'm pretty sure I used the words interchangeably.  But now I understand that being a packer is very different from being a mover.

The packers came first, two women and a man.  Their goal was to pack everything in our house in one day, and then the next day the movers would come and take it out of the house.  We thought this was a pretty ambitious goal for three people, but we figured we weren't the experts, so we would see how it went.  One woman went to the basement to start packing our wall of books, and the other went to the kitchen to start packing dishes.  The guy stuck with us and packed our air freight which I had piled up in our dining room after selling the dining room furniture.

We managed to get almost everything we wanted in the air freight, but the awkwardly shaped baby items definitely required some packing ingenuity.  That took most of the morning.  Then the guy went upstairs to start packing the bedrooms.

We ordered pizza, but, to their credit, the packers barely stopped to eat.  As the afternoon wore on though, it became obvious that they were not going to finish packing our house.  Jeff went to my parents' house to take care of the girls, and I stayed while they packed and packed.  Finally, at 9pm their supervisor told them to call it a day.  The plan was that the next day would be packing in the morning and moving in the afternoon.

When four guys showed up the next morning, I was optimistic, but again, the morning wore on and there was still so much left to pack.  When someone from the moving company came by to check on us half way through the day, we pleaded for more people.  Well, be careful what you wish for.  At 6pm, the army arrived, six more big, loud packers/movers.  They swarmed through the house, and we had ten people packing, moving, shouting between floors, and walking in and out.  It was crazy, but by 8pm, everything was loaded onto the truck, and I watched my worldly belongings drive away.

More movers and packers came for our storage items the next day.  Painters came the day after that, and the cleaning crew the next day.  By Sunday I was walking through my clean, empty house.  It was actually really sad.  I'm so excited about our coming adventures, but I love my house, and I will be happy when we're back in it again after three years.