Hi there! Long time, no see. It’s been a wild ride over the last 14 months, and I’ve built up a lot of words and thoughts in the interim. There’s a lot to cover, and I’m not going to get through even half of it in this post, but here’s the abbreviated version: I moved back to the States, accidentally got a job as a marketer in the tech industry, moved back in with my family, COVID happened, The Boyfriend moved back to Canada (we’re still together, don’t worry), and I moved to Seattle.
So… hi from Seattle, Washington! Just for fun, I thought I’d write a highly personal guide to moving in a pandemic. There may be some useful information tucked in here somewhere, but don’t count on it.
Step 1: Live with your parents during the pandemic, because you were going to get your own apartment sometime in March/April with your boyfriend, but then COVID happened, and you’d rather be somewhere with a yard anyway.
Step 2: Continue living with your parents for nine months. Somewhere around month five, send your boyfriend back to Canada so that he doesn’t break any visa laws. Occasionally stare at the ceiling and wonder how you’re a fully employed 25-year-old and still living with your parents. Then remember that normal rules don’t apply because there’s a pandemic going on. Rinse and repeat this thought process as needed. Start a savings goal to move out, just in case.
Step 3: Have your parents’ house almost burn down (this is an exaggeration, but not a large one). As you sit on the couch at your grandmother’s house, waiting for the evacuation orders to change, start wondering why you’re putting up with living in a highly flammable area with emotionally flammable family members. Decide with great urgency that the situation has to change, and it has to change now.
Step 4: The next day, ask your boss if you can move to Seattle in two weeks. Get a yes from them and HR. Start looking at apartments online.
Step 5: Spend two weeks alternating between being very excited and wondering if you’ve completely lost your mind. Do some happy bouncing, some panicked crying, and quite a lot of packing.
Step 6: Put on a mask, get on an airplane, and go up into the sky over the Bay Area. It’s the summer of 2020, so your plane will smell like smoke once you enter the cloud cover, because those “clouds” aren’t condensed water. They’re smoke. Catch sight of multiple wildfires as you go up the coast, because while this year was a mess before, it’s now literally on fire. Wonder why the airlines bother giving you snacks when you can’t take off your mask to eat them, but hoard all the cookies for later.
Step 7: Land in Seattle, get to your airbnb, and start getting excited because there’s very little wildfire smoke here. But then wake up the next morning to smoke, and then hear from your colleagues in the Bay Area that the sky there has turned orange from the fires. Text your friends and family to confirm. Indeed, the sky is orange. This is apocalyptic, but has the small benefit that you don’t question your decision to move. At least the sky isn’t orange here… yeah, the bar is low.
Step 8: Start learning all the pandemic etiquette that you didn’t need before, because you never left your parents’ house. Masks with valves are out, cloth masks with filters are in. Social distancing applies in most places, except narrow aisles in grocery stores and on busy sidewalks. Get on public transit a few times and feel safe until someone sits down without a mask right across from you. Start scheming how to get a car.
Step 9: Look for an apartment. Visit fewer neighborhoods than you thought, because you’re impatient and half the apartments you wanted to look at ended up being Craigslist scams. Reflect on how Craigslist has caused you to lose all faith in humanity.
Step 10: Choose an apartment and sign a lease. Have a small hiccup where you’re about to sign for a studio on the same day that The Boyfriend finds out he can come back to the States. Find a one-bedroom apartment in the same building and get that instead, after some very confused back-and-forth with the leasing office. But he still won’t arrive for about a month, so carry on with moving alone.
Step 11: Buy! All! The! Things! Feel very grateful that your job in tech allowed you to budget for this move beforehand, since going to garage sales and using Craigslist for furniture is exceedingly difficult when you’re by yourself, without a car, and you’ve got the mild concern that contact with other human beings could literally kill you. Have your parents ship your boxes, have The Commerce Powers of the Internet ship a mattress, bed frame, desk, couch, and most importantly: a bright pink toolkit. Also buy a very small hand-truck with the idea that it will help you move very large furniture boxes.
Step 12: Use your bright pink tools to put together your desk, and feel very pleased with your furniture-putting-together skills. Then have the couch arrive and realize that you can’t possibly move it with your hand-truck. (Useful tip: if you’re moving by yourself and have no muscle to speak of, go for the biggest hand-truck.) Luckily end up being able to move the couch by pushing it along the floor and flipping it end-over-end whenever you reach a slightly upraised place like the entrance to the elevator or your door-frame. Hope no one comes into the hallway of your floor to ask what that god-awful noise is as you slowly push the couch into the safety of your apartment.
Step 13: In the process of putting together your furniture and acquiring approximately 1328497238942 other necessary items (trash cans, cleaning supplies, an oven mitt with the Moomins on it), accidentally create a mountain of cardboard boxes. Let the mountain stay in your living room as a piece of avant-garde furniture — or maybe as an artistic commentary on consumerism — for a few days because your apartment building’s recycling bins are full. Finally lug some of the mountain down to recycling, so that it’s downgraded to a hill.
Step 14: Go to Ikea. Wait in the sort of line that’s usually reserved for roller coasters, just to get into Ikea, because pandemic. Purchase many useful things that you hadn’t realized you’d always taken for granted before. For example, kitchen towels. Life is actually really hard without kitchen towels.
Step 15: Get home with your Ikea haul, disinfect everything and put it away, and then realize the true prize: the blue plastic Ikea bag that cost $0.99. It’s the answer to your cardboard hill! Stuff many, many cardboard boxes into the bag and get rid of the entire hill in three trips. The cardboard will pile up again as you continue to acquire the shocking amount of things that an unfurnished apartment requires, but revel in your cardboard-less living room first. (Tip: buy two or three of those bags at Ikea. They’re actually the most useful thing in the store.)
Step 16: Start getting used to living in your new apartment. Think about that really melancholy Taylor Swift song about moving into a new apartment that made you cry when you were a teenager, and decide that you can actually skip the angst this time around. Maybe it’s just because you’re older. Maybe it’s because this is the tenth time you’ve moved in six years. Be glad that your lease is for 11 months, that you’ve finally fulfilled your college fantasy of living in an apartment with a bath mat from Urban Outfitters (this was a very specific fantasy), and that your home is now highly unlikely to burn down.
Step 17: Write a blog post about it.
Leave a Reply