Lessons Learned from A Crazy US Moving Experience

Fresh from my own home buying and moving experience in the US, I could relate to the personal tribulations of the author of the online Chinese article loosely translated as My Insane US Moving Experience.

And I’m happy to note that I have had the wherewithal to short circuit the author’s linear track of house ownership. Like me, the author and his family had their first liberated taste of being among the rank of house owners when they bought a 50 some years old 2-room single dwelling unit

Being young and frugal by nature (I guess perhaps hampered by limited financial resources too), they attended to every household repair by themselves: leaking roof, choked plumbing, damaged lighting, cracked floor. The good thing is then their earthly possessions could best be described as meager and the trilogy of moving was effected by driving a small truck at the end of which their new home still appeared spacious despite its small size

In the article, the author laid out, much less than fondly, the house upkeep experience that attends to owning, in the true sense of the word, a single unattached house (what one would call a bungalow in Malaysia). Everything is DIY, exposing oneself to the physical injury that lurks at every corner of the house: electric shock, burst water mains, scaling up the rickety roof structure and working in the tight space of the roof attic, both during the frigid and torrid temperatures that alternate with the seasons, and getting impaled, though skin deep, by the tiny heat insulating fabric that lines the roof. On the last ordeal, the author recounted his being immersed for long hours in warm water for the needle-like fabric to drop off gradually, a painful remedy as advised by his friend.

One of our friends who has owned a similar house for more than a decade opined that one would have to master the eighteen types of martial arts, a Chinese euphemism for DIY, in order to live affordably in the capitalist and consumeristic society that is US.

For the author, the last straw that broke the camel’s back, a term he used in reverse translation, was the accumulating snow on the roof that seemed prone to crash through the ceiling. That prompted their second house hunt, but this time armed with the bitter experience of having owned a much older one and undergone the dread of maintenance. So he set a few criteria. It had to be a new house. And it had to be a condo, one where the external maintenance is handled through the House Owners’ Association (HOA) with the levy of a sometimes steep HOA monthly fees, dictated by their advancing years where DIY is increasingly seen as a remote proposition, as we have realized

But then the author committed another cardinal sin of house moving: underestimating the stuff that he and his family have accumulated in the intervening years. He turned down friends’ offer for paper boxes, quite content with the twenty or so that he had managed to source from grocery stores, just like we did.

Five days before they were due to vacate, more than half of their belongings remained unpacked, the house strewn with boxes that curtailed movement. A frantic call out for help was made, and his church group responded. The chief marshal of the help group acted by the motto shaped by life’s bitter lessons that anything you have not touched for more than two years, you don’t need it. So it’s either the dustbin or the donation centers. That proved to be the decisive move that saved the day.

His parting words and the message gleaned from his personal journey through the rocky road of house ownership and moving: lead a simple life, only acquire the needed, and realize that we can only eat and use that much. Why spend a lifetime in amassing possessions, only to become burdens that shackle us?

That’s a wise philosophy of life. What do you think?

And speaking of our new home, this is the reason why my wife likes it: an airy kitchen with a command view of the world beyond the kitchen.

Note that the windows sills (three of them) are the prime locations
for decorative placements such as flower in a vase
to further add to the tranquil ambience.