I mentioned the other day that we’re moving. We’ve lived in our apartment for a stupidly long time (12 or 13 years). PartPurple says it’s the longest she’s ever lived in the same place, and it nearly is for me as well. Certainly the longest since I’ve been living on my own.
As we are old and out of shape we’re taking it slow. Also it was challenging to get things to line up. We have to give our present landlord 60 days notice of termination and if we leave before the lease is up they charge us a full month’s rent as a penalty. Trying to find a new place to rent more than 60 days ahead of it being available is tough and we’re not daredevilish enough to just put in our notice and assume we’ll find a place in time. In the end we decided to just double rent for a while. It turned out to be about 6 weeks. This worked out OK since we’re just letting this lease run out, so we don’t have to pay that 1 month penalty, meaning we’re effectively (sortof) only paying double rent for 2 weeks, and we have the security of knowing our new place is locked in.
We pick up the keys to the new place the Monday before Thanksgiving, but we don’t have the movers coming until mid-December (and our old lease doesn’t end until 1st week of January). We’re going to make a few trips back and forth in during that gap, taking little stuff with us just to try to cut down the moving cost (though I wonder if we’ll end up spending more on gas than we’re saving on moving). We’re doing it this way partly beause we don’t want to be mid-move for Thanksgiving (we’ll celebrate that in the old apartment) and partly because we feel like spending some time in the new place will give us a better idea of what needs to go where. Purple has an app that maps the whole place out but once you are THERE in the location things can feel different.
We’ve started packing and purging and man, nothing is easy. We had a bunch of physical media we wanted to get rid of and NO ONE wants this stuff. We put boxes and boxes of DVDs out with signs inviting folks to help themselves and eventually that got rid of the DVDs but we started that back in September and we JUST got rid of the last one. But books? You literally can’t give away books without it becoming a huge production where I’d have to take a day off work and make an appointment somewhere for them to see what they wanted and what they didn’t.
In the old days you could find donation bins everywhere but not anymore. Libraries will potentially take some of them if you make an appointment and if they happen to be in one of their ‘we accept donations’ phases. Even then they apparently don’t add them to the stacks; they just wholesale them to someplace. It’s not worth their effort to process the books, I guess. In the end I found a single donation box about half an hour a way. We took a load of books over and I saw that it was a school of some kind, so I think they want kids books but we left what we had.
Then a lot more purging happened and I had the back of my pickup full of bins of books (5 big plastic bins that I could barely lift). I was desperate to get rid of these things so, after hours, we went back to that donation bin and filled it up with books they probably don’t want. I was kidding about us being arrested for reverse burglary or something. Illegal dumping? But we’re finally almost through the book cases. One to go and it has mostly trade paperbacks that, if we don’t want them, I’m just going to chuck into the recycling bin. Which feels awful but… I gotta get rid of these things.
But man, it makes me sad that giving away books is so hard. In the past people have generally been eager to get free books to sell or distribute!
Mind you we still have boxes and boxes of books packed up that we’re not ready to get rid of. Twelve currently and probably 3 or so more by the time we’re done. We have too many books considering we both prefer reading on Kindle due to eyesight issues. (Long day? Set the font to ‘HUGE’ and enjoy your book.)
Meanwhile the movers are scheduled, to the tune of $2,500, and we’ve paid the security and other stuff on the new place (another $4000) so now we’re even more poor than we used to be. In theory we should get our security deposit back from the current place but we’ll see. Honestly the current place in fairly bad shape, not really due to us but just due to them being old apartments that were never meant to be lived in for this long. Utilities are scheduled to switch over ($150 deposit for water) and happily there’s a place that offers fiber Internet in the new place. I’ll be sad to leave Google Fiber behind but they don’t service the new area.
Speaking of the new area, we’re moving a couple hours south (after talking for years about wanting to go back north) but also we’ll be MUCH closer to the coast and I’m really looking forward to going to the beach semi-regularly. It’s a 30-45 minute drive to the ocean from our new place, so it won’t be something we do every day but we could go once a week if we wanted to. And the nearest city is Wilmington, NC which is a seaside town with a lot of history, as well as board walks and such. I think we’re going to enjoy just going into town to wander around and get an ice cream or something.
We’re really excited because for all the time we’ve living in Raleigh we’ve never really made much use of the city. I just don’t find it very interesting. If I were younger and into going out to clubs and bars and for dinner frequently I’d probably feel differently but as an old penny-pincher there’s just not much of interest there. I’m hoping being near Wilmington and the water will get me out of the house a lot more. Since we lost Lola I can go weeks without leaving the apartment complex, and days without leaving the apartment. My body is starting to pay the price for all this…sitting.
I’m filing this post under Pointless Rambling because wow, if ever a post was pointless, it’s this one. I think I only wrote it to give myself a break from packing. Now to go fill another cardboard box with books I’ll probably never read!
That’s very weird about the books. Books are probably one of the easiest media to dispose of over here. All charity shops (Thrift stores to you, I guess…) are happy to take them and there are literally hundreds of charity shops in a few miles’ drive from… well, from anywhere in Britain, pretty much. Add to that, there’s a place twenty minutes drive from us called the Book Barn that’s basically a warehouse full of books. They’ll take anything and theoretically sell it and pay you a commission, although when I left some stuff with them a few years ago I never heard anything back. Still, later during the pandemic when I was clearing stuff out and the charity shops were closed, we drove to the Book Barn and just left a few boxes of books in their car park, which was how they were accepting stuff back then, so not getting paid didn’t put me off, obviously. I just wanted rid of the things!
Also, loads of villages around where we live have converted the old telephone boxes into book swaps so you could just leave a bunch in there. Some churches do it too. And there’s that thing where you literally leave books in train or bus stations although I haven’t heard anything about it for a while…
DVDs though… those you really can’t give away. They’re in the phase vinyl went through where no-one wants them. If they follow the same pattern, though, which it already looks like they will, they’ll be right back in demand soon enough.
As for 12 years being a long time, we’ve been in this house about 30 now and we’ve been talking about moving for at least half of that. The amount of stuff we have is terrifying though. I have 8,000 comic books, a thousand vinyl albums, several thousand books… Mrs Bhagpuss has enough craft supplies to stock a medium sized store (Literally.) We’re going to have to move someday because we’ll be too old to get up and down the stairs but it’s going to be a nightmare. Good luck with your move!
There are some used book stores around but they only accept 12 books at a time unless you make an appointment, and they’re selective about what they’ll take. I should have started this process in the summer and I could’ve just made a weekly trip or something, but the quantity and my short time allotment to get rid of them prevented that.
We do have these kiosks called The Little Free Library (https://littlefreelibrary.org/) but my sense is they’re aimed at kids. Still we have one in our complex and I keep it stuffed full of books but I could’ve easily filled 20 of these things with all the books (many of which were quite old, and many of which were book club editions which I guess are particularly valueless?)
Here we have a used book store that is happy to give us store credit for most books. Kind of defeats the purpose becuae for every ten books we drop off I am sure at least two come home. But we tell ourselves the the overal quality of our books is contually improviong….or something 😉
Books that the used book store won’t take I put into free mini libraries that are all around town. Most of them are generally empty, which makes me sad. Sometimes I even pass on some store credit becuase I think some particular book really needs to be out in the wild, having adventures!
If I’d known then what I know now I would’ve started this process way earlier and made a little route of free mini libraries that I could stock every week. It was just an issue of having too many books and too little time to spread them around like that.
I had the same issue getting rid of books when I downsized from my house in California to a condo in Escondido (and later a 1-bedroom in San Marcos when both the kids had moved out). I gave away what I could; library didn’t want them, used bookstores only wanted some, and in the end I tossed most of them. It was hard.
One of the things I did throw out was a cookbook that was my grandmother’s and maybe even great-grandmother’s. My mom had had it and when we cleared out her house I took it for sentimental reasons. It was about 4″ thick with what looked like 10 pt type. It was so old and well used it was being held together with duct tape and the pages would still fall out if you weren’t careful.
I have never opened it, probably never would open it, and don’t have anyone to pass it on to so… I put it in the recycling and man, that was hard!!
We’ve been getting ready to move as well. We’ve been in this house and will be moving across the country as well as down-sizing now that all of the kids are out of the house. We’ve taken a ton of stuff to goodwill and will try to sell a bunch on Facebook Marketplace or something like that. It is really a ton of work going through 20 years of accumulated stuff. It’s even harder when you realize there’s actually very little that we want to take with us.
Sorry you got moderated! Shouldn’t happen again now that you are in ‘the system’. 🙂
The one thing we have going for us is that we’re only moving 2 hours away so if something goes wonky we should be able to recover easily enough. When we first moved from New England to here, which was like a 13 hour drive, it was way more nerve-racking, so you have my sympathies!