“I guess I don’t really understand,” I said to my current landlord. “I’m supposed to be out of this apartment by midnight on April 30 but not move into my new place until the morning of May 1st?”
“Well, the joke is that everyone’s supposed to spend the night in their U-haul,” he said.
When he saw that I wasn’t returning his smile he assured me that everything would work out. Turns out, he might be right. The woman currently living in my new apartment said she would be moving out mid-month, allowing me an entire week of slowly shuttling my stuff between two apartments. So when the guy moving into my current space called and asked if he could move in April 30, one measly day early, I said no problem.
Then I received a call that the new apartment hadn’t yet been vacated. Now the woman’s not sure when she’ll move (“Friday maybe? Like, the 28th-ish?”). Then a call from the guy moving into my current apartment asking if he could actually come by on the 29th with “just a van load of boxes to store in a spare room.”
At the moment my apartment looks like a disaster zone. I keep having to fish around in boxes I’ve already packed to find things I need and yet everything I don’t need is strewn about, mocking me. I don’t have a spare room for his stuff. At the moment, I don’t have a spare second to even worry about his stuff. When I tried to gently explain to him on the phone (his third call) that I sympathized with his situation but wouldn’t be able to let him move in the day before I was going to move out – that coordinating a morning move-out for myself and an afternoon move-in for him was all I could manage – he got annoyed. I got annoyed. The whole situation is annoying.
There are moments (brief brief moments) where spending the night in a U-haul with all my stuff seems preferable. I wouldn’t have to stress over which day I’m actually going to get keys to my new place. I wouldn’t have to field phone calls from some random guy asking if he can use one of my bedrooms as a giant storage unit for a few days. I wouldn’t have to make endless phone calls to both landlords, arranging and rearranging meetings to pick up or drop off keys. But then I think about actually spending a night in the front seat of a U-haul and I figure, nah, it’s worth all the hassle.
Have a horror story of not being able to move into your new place early and getting booted from your current place right on time? Yo wants to know. Click “Comments” below.