To Unbox a Home

It seemed like a military spouse urban legend, but I knew she wasn’t lying to me.

It was the night before we were due to leave Virginia, and our family was having dinner with the daughter of my milspouse/mom of many/homeschool mentor, and she had just told me that her mom once unpacked the house after a move in two days flat.

Evidently, the Embodiment of All My Life Goals was literally taking boxes out of the movers’ hands, ripping them open, and passing out the contents to her kids to put away. Forty-eight hours, and the pictures were on the walls.

I admit, right there in the Fredricksburg, Virginia Red Robin, with 90’s pop playing and the smell of perfectly greasy fries suffusing my system, I wanted nothing more than to see how close I could get to that record. And the Man took one look at me, saw the gleam in my eyes, and recognized (smart Man that he is) that there were only two options once the moving truck pulled into the driveway of our new home: stay out of my way or get bulldozed.

I’m not pretending in this moment that these were wise life choices. I’m just letting you see into the insanely competitive drive that motivates me. It wasn’t about beating my friend’s impressive record. It was about the challenge itself.

And as any woman who has survived breastfeeding twins can tell you, we like a good challenge now and then.

Now, my friend will tell you that she was only able to accomplish this feat because she had older kids in the home who could help (including the daughter who told me that story). I’m not sure that’s true. Personally, I think her innate awesomeness made the boxes unpack themselves. Regardless, I had an eleven year old and a husband with a four day weekend in my favor this time. Tiny and the twins were a wash (they only unpack what they want to play with), and Twinkle’s presence was not a point in our favor, seeing that she survives on a steady diet of constant food, mommy-snuggles, and rampant chaos.

Available back-up aside, the real trick to unpacking your home in an insanely short time lies with three secret ingredients.

The first is an unhealthy amount of coffee. This is key. Not only because the coffee keeps you going when you haven’t slept—because you lie awake at night trying to figure out what picture should go where and whether or not the one-and-a-half chair your husband informed you he couldn’t live without (with good reason because it is awesome) would actually fit in the living room space (it did)—not only that, but because if you carry your coffee cup around the house with you while you unpack, you will inevitably leave it somewhere and have to go around to all the rooms finding more things to unpack and put away as you search out your coffee cup. Also, while you are unpacking as you go, you will discover children upon children whom you can put to work for you, though that will only work in direct proportion to the lowering of your standards (or the amount of anal retentiveness that will have you come behind said children and fix whatever they did).

The second secret ingredient is what I call “The Purge”. The Purge happens on the front end of every move and on the back end of every move. The Purge comes with the thought, “Why would I bother to move this?” for the first round and “What in the world possessed me to move this and how did it possibly escape the Purge?” on the second, with a side of trash bags and the ubiquitous give away box (that may also just end up in the trash). The Purge is effective for speed unpacking because of this simple reason: the less you have, the less time it takes to put it all away.

And may I say, we already have a lot of kids to manage; we don’t need a lot of stuff to manage too. Books and coffee cups are evidently the exception to this Universal Truth.

The third secret ingredient is insanity. The kind of insanity that will make your husband beg you to set a cut off time, and then when the cut off time has passed and you’re still feverishly unpacking boxes and insisting that you’re “just finishing up”, he’ll remind you that there is a bathtub in the master bathroom this time and cheesecake in the fridge. The kind of insanity that has a couple handfuls of popcorn and a glass of lemonade for lunch because that will allow you to keep hanging pictures (this sounds smart until you start going fuzzy at the edges every time you stand up from picking the hammer off the floor). The kind of insanity that has the dog trying to convince you to take a nap.

But with those three ingredients, it seems that even the average Joe (that would be me, not Joe as in G.I.) can unpack a four bedroom house in 78 hours (give or take a garage and two boxes of the Man’s stuff that I refuse to touch). It’s not the Queen of All Things MilSpouse’s record of 48, but let’s be honest: we knew that she defied all odds, and none of us had any real expectations of meeting her standards of excellence.

Still, now there are goals left for the next move. Maybe I can shave off a couple hours if I wear an adult diaper and put my coffee in an IV…

Now there’s a thought to make the next change of station that much more appealing!