Moving, stress free

Photo: Contributed

When I was a realtor, I always counselled clients on understanding that moving is one of the most stressful things we can embark on.

I can tell you (largely from my wife’s experience) moving from a large home to a smaller home only compounds the feeling.

Back in 1995, my wife and I sold an old, seven-bedroom guest house to build a home for our family.

Everything went smoothly until I had a meeting crop up that took me out of town. I have no idea to this day why that meeting was so important. Clearly, if I cannot remember, it wasn’t.

Where a cat has nine lives, I seem to have nine chances to dodge a complete divorce and this may very well have been the first one. Not only did I leave my wife at home in Canmore with both the children, but I also had planned the move on my own and to a certain extent accomplished it.

On closing day, however, a series of events unfolded that left my wife in utter distress, perhaps in large part, due to our naiveté. We had heard that the new owners intended to run a B&B also, so we decided single handedly to leave all the beautiful hand-crafted, Douglas fir beds and furnishings as well as the appliances.

We wanted to be a friendly seller. 

All was going swimmingly until my wife was told to remove everything by 9 a.m. or some other ridiculous time frame. Not knowing where to turn, she called a good friend who owned a development company and asked to borrow a trailer.

Instead, Frank showed up and proceeded to untie the knot I had tied in such an accomplished manner.

They say that experience is the ability to recognize a mistake the second time you make it, and in our recent move this past week, I did not want to become experienced.

Instead, I craftily set a move out date two days before we needed to and cancelled all meetings so I could remain in a state of blissful matrimony.

I found out what a chore it is to move on your own from a big house to a smaller house. 

Thankfully, I was not on my own. Friends, family and sometimes almost strangers chipped in at the last minute to smooth the transition. We had a plan to leave at 6 a.m. and left at 6 p.m. with a day and half in hand.

At midnight we pulled in to Kaslo, jumped in to bed and woke up about nine hours later — refreshed and almost ready to contemplate unloading in to the new house.

We will miss the Okanagan and will be frequent visitors, but for now we are buttoning up our lumberjack shirts and getting ready for Kaslo’s biggest event of the year, the Steampunk themed May festival, complete with a logging sports event.

We are now truly Kaslovians.

This article is written by or on behalf of an outsourced columnist and does not necessarily reflect the views of Castanet.