15 Things that can go wrong while moving places

Moving places is always an overwhelming thing to do. You have to think about tons of things and organise, and I haven’t even spoken about the fact yet, that you have to pack your whole life away into boxes and then unpack it and find a new place for everything in your new home... I only had to do this twice in my life so far, but at the second time we had at least three times the stuff than we had the first time, and now – if we would have to move again – we have the double of that amount already. So yes, ‘overwhelming’ might be an understatement.

Additionally, there are tons of problems that might happen during your moving – and believe me, almost all of them will indeed happen. In Hungary, we often mention Murphy’s Law in situations like this, according to which: ‘Anything that can go wrong will go wrong’. Sad, but true.

So, as a precaution, after a thorough research of horror stories all over the internet, I’ve tried to collect basically everything that might go wrong during moving places.

Get a notepad and a pen, here we go.

1. You will never ever have enough boxes. You thought like 50 boxes and bags – different sizes, thickness and carrier strength – will do for this moving. Obviously, it will turn out at the worst time that this amount is still not enough.

2. You find all the stuff that you were looking for in the past few years. Now you don’t need any of them, but you promise yourself you will put all in one place in your new home, and will remember that place, in case you need them next time. Needless to say, 1 week after moving you will already forget where to look for them... but at least, they are in one place.

3. Everything that you need for an uninterrupted and fast packing plays hide ’n seek with you. The scissors, the tape, the label maker, the marker and all the tools will get lost, at least a few times during packing.

4. The best is if you turn on the TV and switch it to your most-most-most favourite channel the minute you start packing. Why? Because judging from my own experiences, you will barely have a clue where did the damn remote go on the first day you started packing. And even if you are lucky to find it sometime (when you don’t actually want to use it, of course), I‘m certain it will disappear again once you need it.

5. Are you looking for something? Of course you are. Well, then be prepared: it is packed in one of the already carefully taped boxes. And it’s obviously not around the top of it, either. So either unpack or try to live without.

6. If there’s a bottle of any liquid in any of the boxes that you forgot to wrap into a shopping bag before packing it, be prepared, it will surely spill out. Not just a bit. The contents of that box will swim in your forgetfulness.

7. Additionally, did you pack all your white clothes into one big bag? Look out, as that will be the only bag that rips and all your favourite dresses will fall out and start rolling about in the most disgusting puddle around.

8. If you have a label maker, use it literally everywhere. Also, never use similar bags for your favourite miscellaneous items and another for the trash. Or if you do, use the above mentioned label maker – otherwise you will spend your last minutes realising you have switched the bags by mistake and run to look for the ‘other one’ around the community bins.

9. Wrap carefully everything that might break. One thing (usually the oldest stuff) will break anyway, no matter what, but at least you won’t have to clean up the mess, as the package will still keep most of the pieces together. Just throw it in the bin.

10. The bigger and heavier a household appliance is, the more likely it will stop working the first day in your new home. So save some money for this as well.

11. Did most of your friends and family members promise they will help you pack? Forget it. Something will happen to all of them. Urgent matters, sickness, sudden problems. Even if some of them do show up, they will speak to you for 2 hours straight, and will just slow you down.

12. Either on the day before, or on the exact day of moving out, you will lose your keys. I remember my whole family searching for the keys on the morning the movers came... Luckily, my dad found them after everything was in the van already. So you better keep them in your shoe that’s on you.

13. The more and bigger stuff you have, the more likely it will rain all day on the day you move. So start worrying about getting that white couch into the van.

14. The movers will most likely be a bit (sometimes even a few hours) late. Even if they are, you still won’t have enough time to calmly finish packing everything.

15. Even after careful measuring and organising, you will find out that your new home did considerably shrink in size by the time you managed to get everything in. You thought it will be bigger than the previous one? Yeah, it never will be in the end.

Always hope for the best, but expect the worst.

Basically, this is the lesson. Two years ago I thought none of these things on the list will happen to me – ever. And then I had to realise all of these are ‘collateral damages’ during moving places, and you can barely do anything to prevent them. You can try, but there is no such thing as a perfect moving. Just accept it and you will find yourself laughing and having a great and relatively calm moving in the end, even if sh!t does happen :).

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