Moving house? Don’t read this column

AMID all the tragedy and horror to befall the world, it remains an indisputable fact that no event is as traumatic as moving house, reveals Joe Hildebrand.

Joe Hildebrand: “It is worth noting that laws of temporal physics as we know them do not apply to tradespeople.”

AMID all the tragedy and horror to befall the world, it remains an indisputable fact that no event is as traumatic as moving house.

If ISIS had any brains, they would get out of international terrorism and get into the removalist business. Indeed, they may well have already done so.

As has been well documented, Melburnians do not travel well. They like to be cosmopolitan — but within a 5km radius of Brunswick Street. And so for a Melbourne boy like myself, who has already suffered the trauma of moving to Sydney — only to become fully assimilated and disowned by his black-skivvied tribe — there is nothing more agonising than moving again.

Of course, I have moved many times in the past but this was as a single man, which involved little more than turning the milk crates from a sideways to upright position. When you have a whole house and two kids to shift, the stakes become dramatically higher.

Moving as a family is much more work than moving as a single man. (Pic: Nigel Lough)

Still, I was at least fortunate enough to also have a wife advising me of every single thing I was doing wrong. And it all began with the following sentence: “Gosh, that sounds a bit pricey.”

In the normal world, this is an attitude consumer experts generally endorse in order to achieve a balance between value for money and peace of mind. However in the world of removalists the balance teeters somewhere between highway robbery and lifelong PTSD.

In our case, we opted for the latter, and my wife booked a moving company that was half the price of the one recommended by our real estate agent.

At this point, it is worth noting that laws of temporal physics as we know them do not apply to tradespeople. For example, while most of us would consider “between 9am and midday” to be a period of three hours, for a tradie it is a period sometime between January and June.

And so when we booked three men with a large truck for between 11am and 3pm and got two men with a small truck at 5pm, we were foolishly disappointed. Fortunately another two men showed up two hours later with an even smaller truck, although we were not allowed to put anything in the smaller truck unless we paid extra. And that was on top of the pot-plant levy.

Joe Hildebrand’s column is in Stellar magazine.

Obviously emotions ran high once plant life was involved, and from here flowed a number of other legally elastic situations. This included a demand that we drive to an ATM to pay them in cash and a slightly more contrite request for them to cut off a length of our garden hose so they could siphon some petrol.

After some heated negotiations, we gave them the hose on the condition we could pay by card, marking the very first time in my life I prayed for a transaction to be declined. It also marked the first time in my life an assertive young man had cut off my hosepipe and not made a bong out of it.

Sometime after midnight — at least by the Gregorian calendar — I staggered into our new home and collapsed on a box marked “Fragile”. My wife asked what it had cost and I wondered where to start. Emotionally? Physically? Mentally? In the end, I just told her the price.

“Wow!” she recoiled in shock. “That’s actually pretty good.”

Joe co-hosts Studio 10, 8.30am weekdays, on Network Ten.

Originally published as Moving house? Don’t read this column