Headaches and Moving Timelines

Written December 14th, 2010

In my last post, I briefly mentioned that moving across the country will be a headache. Yeah, that’s an understatement.

To quote one of my favorite bloggers, Allie from Hyperbole and a Half: “Packing all of your belongings into a U-Haul and then transporting them across several states is nearly as stressful and futile as trying to run away from lava in swim fins.”

First of all, as of yet (yet being December, when I'm writing this) we don’t have a set timeline for our move. Which frustrates me to no end, being the planner that I am. My husband is lucky enough to get to keep his job as a managing partner for his engineering firm (and they’ve got some really cool plans to make it almost like he’ll be there in the office, which I’ll probably write about at some point), but he needs to figure out a good time to move with his project load. Right now he’s in the middle of a really big project, for which the current phase won’t end until sometime in March or April. But he won’t know for sure the end date until early to mid January. So we’re on hold until then, saying we’ll *probably* move sometime in April.

Secondly, we’ve decided that it will be a whole lot less stressful for us to just rent a house for a year, as opposed to trying to buy from across the country. That way we can have plenty of time learn about the area, and make a better decision on which neighborhood to buy in. Not to mention, we’ll be saving around $15k in rent in just one year, compared to the outrageous amount we pay to rent in California now. Which will be a nice addition to our down payment!

But renting a house is stressful too, because we need to fly out there to look at a bunch of houses in a very short amount of time, commit to something we can live in for a year, and then be ready to move into it in a month or less, since generally that’s just how it works with house rentals; they’re usually almost ready for new tenants at the time you’re looking at them. Right now we’re thinking we might cut our mid-March trip to Florida short by a few days, and swing up through North Carolina to find a house then, which would put us in the early to mid-April timeline to move. Which may or may not work out with my husband’s job situation.

And oh yeah, we also have a trip in mid-April to New Orleans, which I’m not missing for anything. It’s only a long weekend trip, but still something we need to plan around. My birthday is also in early April, but 29 isn’t a very exciting birthday, so I’m ok with missing it. Plus, big picture, we’ll be buying a house around my 30th birthday, and THAT will be something to really celebrate!

Those are the big obstacles right now to nailing down our move. I’m sure by the time I actually post this they’ll be figured out, but for now, I’m nothing but frustrated by not having answers. How can I feed my compulsion to plan?