Many people love to camp. They grab their tent, their sleeping bag, flashlight, and frying pan and they’re off to enjoy the outdoors, take in the scents of nature 24hr/day.
Not me. Oh, I love the outdoors, but only for a select amount of time. No overnighting, thank you very much. After a dirty day in the elements, take me home to my shower and my bed, please and thank you. I’d put myself somewhere on the spectrum between glamping and Troop Beverly Hills. Luckily for me, camping in your own home is on that spectrum.
After the estate sale, we’d been left with our beds (which we’d put behind a locked door), two green floor-to-ceiling cabinets, and a wooden chair the dogs had gotten the better of. We saved some pots and kitchenware, notably the coffee machine, and were otherwise living out of suitcases as of the beginning of March.
Three weeks until departure. This, we could do.
Homework on the floor in empty rooms after the Estate Sale left us with very few pieces of furniture. Dinner was on the floor, too, until we discovered we still had a card table we could use. The boys used crates for chairs.
The idea of a minimalist life was urgently appealing. Who needs all this stuff? A towel, a bed, and a nightstand — that’s all I need. Oh, and a closet. And preferably a set of drawers, too. Hangers, of course. And, I mean, I don’t need a coffee machine, but the people who interact with me need me to have a coffee machine. And my books, of course. So somewhere to put my books. And all my kitchen gadgets so I can make my meals. A television, of course — because I don’t want to watch all the Liverpool and San Diego Wave matches on a phone. And, with that, I’ll need a comfy couch. With pillows.
Ah, the minimalist life.
We were enjoying this strange, new existence, looking down at the final days of school and U.S. residency when Husband received a request for a meeting with his new company.
“I wonder if they want to offer us more money for the move,” Husband said. He had a point. The move money they gave us was laughable. They had a requisite amount/limit for anyone moving inside the country and anyone moving outside of the country. Of course, they were accustomed to outside of the country being within the E.U., not the West Coast of the United States.
Deep breath; I digress.
“I wonder if they want to offer us more money for the move,” Husband said.
“Maybe,” I said, wanting to believe that could be true. I didn’t see why that would require a face-to-face meeting though. Send an email. We’re increasing the measly amount we offered to give you for your relocation four fold. Congratulations. See you in Switzerland. Easy peasy. No, this was going to be weightier. And it already made me sweat to carry the thought of that weight.
So Husband took another 6AM meeting, but this one didn’t require me, so he took it alone. Afterall, I had to get ready for work. He set his computer on a built-in shelf in our empty closet and met with the onboarding team.
I couldn’t hear too much from the bathroom. Just enough to be able to tell the person on the line with him was not a native English speaker. The accent was telling. And Husband’s tone of voice. (Husband’s tone of voice is almost always the same: light, jovial, soft, pleasant. I’ve only heard it go edgy when I poke his buttons for long enough, or when our kids do the same thing. Oh, and a bunch of times when he took meetings with Old Boss.)
Husband’s tone of voice quickly changed from friendly to tense. I emerged from the bathroom to hear him say, “…because we have our house rented out. As of April 1st, we have no place to live.”
And shortly thereafter, “We have booked our flights. We arrive March 24th. Our renters arrive April 1st.”
The bottom line: our visas did not go through quickly enough for the April 1st start date. The company hoped everything would work out to have Husband start May 1st instead.
We had planned to camp in our own home, with minimal gear, for three weeks. We had not planned to take our suitcases and book a campsite to sleep outdoors. Hopefully, we wouldn’t have to…
I’ve moved plenty of times. Within a city. Across a state. From West to East and East to West. From North to South and back again. I’ve lived all over the United States. Any time there’s a move, a massive to-do list materializes around closing up shop in the current venue and opening afresh in a different location. The list of what needs to happen seems to self-populate, then overpopulate.
Some of that stays true for an international move — the old standbys remain: find a place to live, pack, set a departure date. Some new ones pop up, though: what do I need to do to get a visa? is my passport up-to-date? do dogs need passports? how do I look for a job in a country in which I do not speak the languages? how do we get on House Hunters International? So, while many Americans were planning what to do for Superbowl Sunday, my husband and I were sitting down to plan out what we knew to plan out for an international relocation.
Backwards planning, here we go: Husband’s first day on the job is April 1. We want at least a few days to adjust to the time change (9 hours), so let’s plan on March 23rd-ish. Holy crap! Those plane tickets are expensive! Is it any cheaper if we make about 14 stops along the way? The dogs can’t make 14 stops along the way. Someone has to fly direct with them. I wonder how much stuff we can manage to fit in a suitcase to bring on a flight.
“Hey, by the way, what are we doing with all our stuff?”
“What do you mean what are we doing with all our stuff?”
“Do we ship it all to Switzerland?”
“That sounds like an insane cost. It’s expensive enough to move within the country, but, overseas would be nasty.”
“So what are we going to do with all our stuff?”
“Mmmm… sell it?”
“All of it?”
“Or most of it?”
“That sounds like some insane logistics. Who will be here taking photos, creating posts, scheduling people to check out our stuff or pick it up?”
“Mmmm… Well, I have to go to work every day,” I gave Husband a you-know-what-I-mean look, and he gave me an Ain’t-No-Way-I’m-Doing-All-This response, so I said, “I guess we better get started.”
“Let’s start with the bikes,” suggested Husband. “They take up so much space in the garage anyway, and I hate how crowded it gets in there.”
“Yeah, if you help me bring them out, I can handle the bike posts.”
I opened the garage door, stepped outside, and Husband and I started dragging bikes up the driveway. I took pictures of their frames, their handlebars, their wheels, etc.
“Are you going to post them on Facebook Marketplace or Craigslist or OfferUp or what?” he asked.
“Yes,” I said. “Only I can’t access my Facebook account to use Facebook Marketplace.”
“Why not?”
I sighed heavily. “Ugh. New phone. Different computer. They don’t believe I’m me and I’ve no way to prove it anymore.”
“Well, just use mine.”
After three hours having the bikes up for sale, I decided this was not going to work. I could not stand the bombardment of emails asking if any of our eight bikes were still available or haggling for a cheaper price or suspiciously requesting that a distant relative pick up a bike after asking for Zelle or Venmo information. If a handful of bikes caused this much headache, what would it look like to sell almost everything we own?
Husband and I are thrifty shoppers. We do not disparage goods that belonged to someone else before we encounter them, and we welcome their story into our home. We have picked up numerous pieces of free furniture next to our neighbors’ mailboxes, and, if there’s a garage sale nearby, we head over with our vision piqued for a few key items. (I won’t tell you what they are because I’m not going to invite the competition.)
“Maybe we have a garage sale,” Husband thought out loud. “At least then all our stuff goes at once. Or several garage sales.”
“That’s probably wise,” I said.
Even as I voiced it, I thought it sounded exhausting. People are exhausting. Lack of structure is exhausting. A garage sale is both lots of people swarming in waves and hours and hours long right outside the door that leads to my very comfy bed — which I am not selling until I absolutely have to.
“I’m going to look into estate sales,” I said as the notion occurred to me. I would definitely pay someone to handle this mess for me.
So that’s what we did. I found the numbers for a couple of local companies, handed them off to Husband, and he did the rest. Set up appointments with them, selected one to use, set the dates, and we were on our way.
“Add it to the calendar!” Husband said. “The last week of February into the first week of March.”
“Why a whole week?” I asked.
“Because they do everything for us.”
“What do you mean everything?”
“Everything. They organize all our stuff and price it during the week so that on the weekend they are ready to have people shop. Then they run it like a store. They don’t even want us around.”
“That sounds awesome!” I declared.
“And get this?” he said. “The woman who will be in charge of our estate sale is named Richelle.”
I smiled. “Well, it’s meant to be.”
“Indeed. But anyway, we’ve got to be out of the house by the final week of February — and we have to have gone through everything in the house to know what we’re bringing to Switzerland and what we’re not so it can get sold. We need our suitcases so we can pack them and see what fits. We need some boxes to…uh… will your parents let us store some things?”
“You mean some stuff before we find a permanent apartment.”
Yes, in the meantime, Husband’s company committed to finding us a temporary apartment — three months on their dime. I mean, on their Swiss franc — because finding an apartment in Zurich is notoriously difficult. And what do we know about where to live in Zurich?
“Yeah. We’re bound to have some things we don’t need to travel with but will ultimately need while we live there.”
“Or want.” I thought of my antique books, my collection of Jane Eyre, the Ephesians study I’d written in college.
“Keepsake type stuff, too.”
“Yeah, they’d probably let us,” I told him. “I’ll ask my dad, buy suitcases for everyone since we only have one or two that remain usable, and figure out where we are going to stay during this estate sale while I still have work and the kids still have school.”
“And I’ll ask around to see if anyone will let us stay with them.”
“Great.”
“Speaking of school, we need to sit down and determine the boys’ last day.”
We met with Older Son’s high school counselor to gather information to make our decision and discovered that, because his school was on a trimester system, grades closed on March 7th on the day of his last final.
Perfect. March 7th would be his last day. And, since it turned out Younger Son’s grades closed on March 8th, we made that his last day and informed both schools of the plan.
“How about I finish before them?” I asked, thinking about how challenging it would be to live out of a suitcase at someone else’s home or in a hotel during the week of the estate sale, all while teaching a full time schedule.
“That’d be nice,” said Husband, “but I think I’ll have to punch some numbers and see what we can manage.”
GRRRRRR!!! Stupid logic! Can’t I just stop working now? I’m ready. Say the word. [see more about this mindset in the original post, The Preface] No? Sigh. Okay. Fine. Let math have its way. As always.
We ended up setting my last day a week after the boys’ left school: March 15th. The Ides of March. For an English teacher, it was fitting, but I’d rather have gone out on Pi Day. I didn’t want to be Caesar in this play! No et tu, Brute for me.
After weeks of revisions, the final [simplified — because I can’t even follow the madness of the full, complex, arrows-everywhere, to-do list post-its layered on top full version] schedule of events looked rather like this:
April 1: Husband’s first day on the job March 26: Everyone arrives in Zurich March 25: KZ departs from LA with the dogs on a direct flight to Zurich March 22: Husband and Boys depart from LA with stops to see relatives in different states along the way to Zurich March 18-22: Sell KZ’s car March 18: Leave San Diego, stay in LA March 16: Goodbye Gathering March 15: KZ’s last day teaching March 10-15: Sell Husband’s car March 7&8: Kids’ last day of school February 28 – March 3: Estate Sale (find a place to stay)
Sounds simple enough, right? Yes, that is the simple list. — Oh, what the heck. Just to give you an idea, here are some of the to-do items flying out from that simple list. Dog training — do they have to be crated or do they go in the cabin on the flight? Rent out house — company? utilities? etc. Fingerprints to FBI ASAP! (Visa) U.S. Phone Numbers/Cell Phone situation ALL Autopayments & Subscriptions — cancel USPS Forwarding Medical Records Donation receipts Electronic Waste Shipping Guitars
You can see how these would have all sorts of arrows associated with them. It was chaos. It’s John Nash’s office after he was sent to the psychiatric hospital, or at least the film version of it.
It felt a bit like that, too. Not to belittle mental illness, but, my goodness, we felt the paranoia of missing something vital that would set us back or keep us from moving altogether, as well as the schizophrenia of a voice popping up, albeit our own, adding items and deadlines to the already haywire list. Something was bound to go wrong. It was only a matter of time before we found out what…
KZ Rochelle 