simont | Packing

Packing

Well, it's nearly here at last. My new house had some carpets fitted on Monday to replace the dodgy laminate flooring downstairs and one completely destroyed carpet upstairs; so it's now a genuinely habitable building and all I have left to do is move into it, which is booked for Tuesday. (And then take care of an endless to-do list of big and little things after that, of course, but at least the waiting will be over.)

Which means it's time to pack. Also on Monday I drove over to the removal company's depot and picked up a carload of sturdy cardboard boxes, and last night I began packing my belongings into them.

I … hate … this bit. I really, really hate it. Words have a hard time expressing just how much I loathe packing to move house, but I'll give it a try anyway.

For a start, it's fundamentally demotivating. Everything I take off a shelf and put in a box is making my home look less like a home and more like a mess, and I like my home. I've been working hard all year to move out of this particular home, admittedly, but that's irrelevant, because what I'm talking about here is the abstract concept of ‘my home’ which isn't about the building but about having a layer of all my stuff arranged around me in a comforting and cosy manner. That aspect of ‘my home’ has evolved gradually over the years, but there's been a continuity to it which has made it perceptibly the same thing for far longer than any particular house or flat has contained it. So tearing it down piece by piece, even though I know in a week or so it'll all be back around me again, is heartbreaking and difficult. Every time I finish packing a box I just want to sit down and mope about it, and the very last thing I want to do is to start packing another one.

By contrast, I find unpacking at the other end of the job to be a breeze. People often seem to find this unusual, but it's true: when everything that comes out of a box on to a shelf makes the place look more like a home, it's constantly making me happier as I do it, which encourages me to keep on doing it. So the process is self-motivating, and things just seem to fly out of boxes as if there's no tomorrow. In fact, last time I did it, there wasn't: I spent days halfheartedly packing and still hadn't really finished when the removal men arrived, but unpacking zipped by in a matter of hours and by the time I went to bed on moving day I'd completely finished it.

Secondly, a lot of packing is difficult. It's not so bad when it's things like books, which are collected together already and arranged in orderly lines; I just hoist them off the shelf in the largest armload I can carry without them going everywhere, and I stick them in the bottom of a box. But going round the edges of the room picking up endless large and small things that I've been treating as unnoticed parts of the scenery for years and now have to readjust to treating as foreground and work out how to fit into a box … that's hard, not (just) emotionally but intellectually, because I have to try to make my brain point in a direction it isn't used to pointing.

And because I've been treating half my stuff as background and scenery, there's always more of it than I think. I'll fill a box, and I'll look around, and I'll realise that behind all that lot there was another lot of random stuff I'd completely forgotten about which is going to take another box. So my estimate of the number of boxes still to do remains largely constant, which is another demotivating factor. By contrast, again, when I'm emptying boxes it's much easier because the boxes are big and discrete and in my way and I can't possibly miscount how many I've got left.

I hate this, with a passion. I remembered from my last move in 2003 that I disliked packing and was slow at it, which is why I'm starting it a week ahead of time instead of a few days. But I had forgotten just how much I disliked it; in fact I had even forgotten the order of magnitude of how much I disliked it. I hate packing.

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Right, this calls for a bargain. I have a lot of packing material and I am good at packing. How about I help you pack your house if you help me unpack my stuff? I have boxes of crap lying around in everybody's way still.

Possibly. Though I worry that I might not be nearly as good at unpacking someone else's stuff as my own: if I have to stop and ask you where everything should go, it might easily take twice as long as if you just did it yourself, and irritate you to the point of murder in the process :-/

Most of the stuff I am still unpacking is a mixture of clothes and crockery, which is why I am spending most of my mornings in a murderous rage, because all my clothes are wrapped up in a box around the crockery. So that part is probably easy; you just have to sort it into shirts, socks and crockery. And there is a box of bottles that all go in the same place, which is easy. There are also a pile of bags, which are less easy, but I can do those. The other other thing is to set up the sewing table in the spare room so I stop tripping over my sewing machine.

Meanwhile, packing is easy, so I don't mind popping round and helping with yours sometime over the weekend.

Hmm. Well, we could certainly try it. I have nothing booked for this evening and was planning to spend it packing, so how about I come round to yours (conveniently local now, of course) instead and try to help you unpack? If I turn out to be worse than useless, then you'll be excused from your half of the bargain.

Ah, tonight is gay coffee night. Tomorrow is possible but I was half-thinking of going to the Carlton and I have food in the fridge I need to eat that goes with pasta, so the plan of "pack, go to carlton for food" also fails. Friday I am busy. Ah.

How about I just help you pack sometime this weekend, and just stop whinging and get on with my own unpacking? :/

And I'm definitely planning to be in the pub tomorrow, so yes, it looks as if the unpacking plan fails due to lack of mutual free time. Oh well.

You'd certainly be welcome to come and help me pack at the weekend anyway if you like, and I'll have to, oh, I dunno, pay you back in drinks next time we're both in the Carlton, or something like that. On Saturday afternoon I expect to be in the pub to see Elise, and on Sunday afternoon/evening I'm generally busy from about 4ish onwards, but any time outside those would be fine. (But don't forget you didn't get on with my bathroom last time you visited.)

Ah, but now I live round the corner, so I can go home and wee :)

How about I turn up on Saturday morning about 11ish and help packing and then we can mosey over to the pub after a few hours possibly with lunches engineered in there somewhere without me either eating all your edible wheatless food or poisoning you? I cannot remember where you currently live, because it is an important combination of numbers and words and has therefore been displaced in favour of lines from silly films and words in Elvish that begin with Q in order to completely mess up English Scrabble-playing ability.

I find with doing things like that that putting music on that I really love or is bouncy and motivating helps... of course if you haven't packed your music system yet!!

I too hate packing - *sympathy*. Hopefully soon it will all be unpacked and arranged back into its proper order in your new house so you can turn it into home.

I love packing: it's so easy to see what still needs to be done, it's easy to make progress on without much actual thought having to go into it (10 pick up nearest stuff, 20 put it into nearest box, 30 goto 10) and it's very satisfying to see the number of filled boxes mounting up.

I hate unpacking: you have to apply intellectual and emotional effort along the lines of "where should this go, and in fact do I even still want it at all?" and so each box takes aaages and you end up with a never-diminishing pile of boxes, each of which probably has less stuff in it than it did when you started but loads of other random stuff that you are less sure about still in the bottom. It gets exponentially harder as you go along, because you leave the stuff that's too hard to think about until later until eventually all you've got is stuff that's too hard to think about.

It sounds like you and I apply the emotional and intellectual effort at opposite ends of the process; I think your way sounds better.

I think the reason it takes me a long time to pack things is because my packing program goes something more like this:

10 pick_up(item)
11 ans eq ' '
20 print, 'do I need this stuff?'
21 read, ans
30 if ans eq 'no' then freecycle,item,resultf
31 if resultf='fail' then oxfam,item
32 endif
40 endif else box(item)
50 endelse
60 goto 10

except with steps to ask on LJ whether anybody wants it and see if it is a computer and then give it to Reboot or if it is a broken electrical object and then bribe somebody to take it to Milton HWRC. Some of which will of course fail due to unreliability of people who say they will do or take away things and my own inability to collate things that need to go to the tip in time.

(that was an ugly mixture of IDL and random not-quite-fortran, and would probably fail to compile anyway, sorry) anyway that is very processor efficient especially when car eq 'n'.

Interesting. I find I don't have the same sort of issue, because when I'm packing my thoughts are around the unpacking at the other end, ensuring that all things which want to be put into a given location are in the same box, mentally measuring where things that I'm putting away will go, where will be convinient, where will look nice.

Of course, it also helps that I enjoy object tetris. There's a certain satisfation to a well packed box, and the knowledge that fewer trips will have to be made as a result of it.

I sympathise; historically I've always preferred packing (done at high speed in a vast panic, and enjoying the challenge of tesselating all the little bits) to unpacking (dragged out over months of not quite knowing where to fit everything), but this move recently has been the first one where I've shared the perspective you describe above.

Packing other people's stuff, however, I find positively enjoyable. I LIKE the tesselating, and I like how easy books are, and I like how satisfying it is to watch the empty space grow around you, when it isn't your space. Clearly we should have some sort of barter system where we throw small packing parties and pack each other's stuff by turns :)

I would like unpacking if I didn't feel I had far more stuff than I have space for it. I like putting things neatly in places that are right, but this is jolly difficult if you don't have enough places. So when unpacking is the time I am most brutilly confronted with the fact I have too much stuff and too little space. Which also means it's the time when I get rid of things (because packing is always done in a hurry, because I have to move on my moving day, but unpacking can stretch to fill up time) which depresses me too.

*hugs* Hope the new house is lovely!

Ah, but one of the major reasons I move house is to go to places with more space. The new one has five sheds, a spare room, and a Loft of Joy. So that particular problem doesn't generally cause me trouble.

*hugs* I think it will be. Eventually. Once I buy a bed to go in the spare room you'll have to come and see it!

Why are you keeping my girlfriend in your loft? Is there something I should know?

"Where am I?"
"In the loft."
"What do you want?"
"Insulation."

And a floor!

Every time I move house I get rid of (recycle, bin, whatever) about a third of my stuff. So, in that way it's useful. But yes, I hate packing too. Especially when you've done a full day's work, have to come home and pack, then fall into bed, and repeat ad nauseum.

You could exchange GBP for less miserable packing? We did this when we moved here (at my new employers' expense), and I think it was Money Well Spent, as I too hate packing.

Words have a hard time expressing just how much I loathe packing to move house

That is so incredibly you. You love to be settled, don't you :) *hug*

PAY for the removal people to pack you. They do it on the morning that you move, it takes them a couple of hours and sets you back around the £100 mark. I guess it depends on how much it is worth paying for the distress to go away.

I've paid for packers twice now. I am never ever going back to packing myself unless I am destitute.

Packing is fine; to me, the unpacking involves more faff because I'm hideously indecisive and have no idea how to arrange Stuff. If you need any help packing give Pete and me a shout. Also, if you feel the need to mope come round and I shall provide tea and hugs and Ikaruga (I've fallen out of the habit of Carltoning for various reasons but I'm always on call for simonHugs :))

WEll, the up-side is that you don't plan on doing this again. Ever.

True, although I'm not currently inclined to bet on that plan surviving contact with the real world. I suspect probably quite a lot of people say things like "never again" shortly after buying a house for the first time, and I'm fairly sure most of them end up changing their minds eventually. So while it certainly seems like an attractive option right now to plonk my arse down in the new house and never ever move it again, I don't think I want to bank on it working out that way...

Packing is definitely worse than unpacking. We paid the removal firm to do most of our packing for us last time we moved - was definitely worth it.

I can pack: you don't have to decide things, you can see the pile of packed boxen growing, there's a hard deadline.

I can't unpack because there's no deadline and I don't know where I want things to go. I'm still not unpacked from moving back to Cambridge (though that's partly because this is a temporary interim six-month house, which makes it even less worth the hassle).

You appear to have described at least some of the reasons why I also don't like packing.

Sorry about drunkenly misremembering things tonight. I was after half-remembered Chaitin's Constant (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chaitin%27s_constant), which is definable but incomputable.

Hmm, yes. That differs from the construction we discussed last night (a binary expansion with bit i set if the program represented by i halts), but both have the property of being a non-computable real which you can precisely mathematically define.

Chaitin's constant contains less information than the silly binary expansion number, but since it's a probability it's almost justifiable as something you might actually want to talk about, unlike the binary expansion number which is very obviously only a pathological counterexample :-)

Yes. I'd not looked at this area for a few years.

The one I mentioned last night is, as far as I can tell, entirely my own bitrotted rubbish!

It's one I've heard before, though. It's probably the single most natural thing to spring to your mind if someone challenges you to define an uncomputable real. Chaitin's version is more elegant but less obvious.

I believe, from posts like this one and similar, that you are knowing of a good and reliable removals company. Would it be possible for you to make a recommendation?

I've moved with Fulchers three times and had no complaints.

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