Relationship Test #53: Moving

Wife and I are moving. It sucks. She made this comment the other day when we were sitting on the couch after a trip back from our new place. My primate brain went "oh, that sounds sexy!" then my old brain goes.. I'm tired. This is tiring. I just want to go to bed.

Apparently my wife was scarred for life watching ju-on and paranormal activity with the attic scenes. I did not know that until now.

Wife is a pack-rat. We have a "comfortably lived in, but verging on an episode of 'Hoarders'" theme in our home. There's no time to weed through stuff anymore, though. Can't bring her every little thing and let her decide on it anymore. It's all getting stuffed into the bag of holding, and I pray she hasn't pack-ratted another bag of holding some place that I accidentally pack inside the other while doing so.

Speaks for itself. We staved off one rent increase when we literally showed them that the same unit we're in was going for less if we were moving in new. But, this time around, they didn't budge. Pay the rent increase, or get to packing. We decided "fuck that" and got packing. We're at the point in our lives where we'd really like to move up to a house, but wife's job may be changing to other places soon. So, looked into renting houses. Realized we can get far more space for same rent. Granted, bills will go up (larger space to heat/cool.) I finally get my own office. She gets her own office/craft room. We get a dual-car garage instead of the single garage we've been struggling with.

I make it sound like the apt complex gave a shit about us turning in our move-out notice. They didn't. We went to their office, filled it out, desk person took it back to their manager. I thought they'd come out and try to negotiate with us. Nope. Desk person comes back and says "ok, you're all set." Wow.. fuck you.

The entire landlord / renter thing is supposedly B2C, but you never feel like a customer. You feel like an inconvenience to them at best, and a parasite at worst. They act like we should be grateful we can pay them shit-tons of money to live in their depreciating places, and they want to know everything about you while you know nothing about them. It's very insulting.

We tried looking at homes ourselves. It wasn't fun.

Getting a realtor to help us got us access to more houses faster, but, good lord, like 80% of the places were awful. The pictures you see if the inside look nice, b/c they're staged. But, you walk in, and realize the landlord or property management company hasn't even cleaned or painted or gotten the funk of the previous tenants out yet. My opinion is if they're willing to show the place to me in that condition, then that's the condition they expect me to accept it in.

Nope. F that.

When we walk in and there's waves of cat funk or dog odor or baby diaper... ew. Next.

Finally found a place, though.

You reach a certain age where you gotta just hire movers. And then you reach another age where you hire movers AND do prelim trips of your own to move all the crap you have.

Moving sucks. But, you find out how good or bad your relationship is when doing it. I think we're doing pretty good.