The Move!

Wow, moving is hard enough as it is, but for the sustainably-minded it can be torture! The past three months were very fortunate for us -- I got a new job, we moved back to the Midwest, and we sold our house -- yet extremely stressful.

I know I’ve lost quite a few regular readers and I hope to earn them back now that we’re getting settled. So, I’ll get right back into sustainability topics starting with the one at hand, which is the eco-crappy process of moving states! In October, I learned that I was selected for a job with the Air Force at Wright Patterson Air Force Base in Dayton, Ohio -- a dream job for me both in terms of the working environment and the location. But first the big news -- the house we found to rent is in the village of Yellow Springs, Ohio, which many of you may know from the Community Solutions Conference held every year on Peak Oil! The village is by far the closest thing I’ve seen to a sustainable community, and is far better able to weather some of the challenges ahead than anywhere we’ve ever seen. I’ll have much, much more on Yellow Springs as time goes on, but for now I’ll get back to our moving story.

The first step in moving involved getting the house ready to sell, which is a much less sustainable process than I had thought. First, there’s the cleaning. Now, we’ve already switched to using baking soda and vinegar for most household chores, but for the real rugged cleaning (making things pretty vs. functionally clean) they don’t always do the job. And to sell a house in the current market (especially Florida!) houses that appear “dirty” to buyers are getting put at the bottom of the list. We had some chemical cleaners left from before, and while it was painful to use them we knew it would be far more painful and environmentally damaging to be flying back and forth to keep tabs on the house if we didn’t sell it. (FYI, the items that required the deep cleaning were the shower door, the stains on the counters, the floors, and the toilets. Baking soda and vinegar did a good job with the rest of it.)

Then there was the painting. Fortunately we had leftovers for most of the rooms in the house that needed touch-up, including some low-VOC, but we did have to buy a gallon of porch paint. Again, this was not a very environmentally-friendly process.

Of course, once we had the house all pristine we couldn’t risk messing it up, because we never knew when a showing would be scheduled. This meant that cooking needed to be kept to a minimum, which meant a lot fewer healthy organics. We managed to work in the healthy stuff (and avoid restaurants) a lot better than I expected, though our diets still suffered a little.

Packing up and moving was by far the biggest hit to our sustainability. Since I work for the government, they hired a moving company to come in and pack us up. Let’s just say that moving companies don’t always pack in the most efficient (or logical) way -- we found boxes that had half their volume stuffed with paper, boxes that we had packed stacked into other boxes, and empty cardboard boxes inside bigger cardboard boxes. It was a little frustrating. On the plus side, we can reuse most of it for our next move into our permanent house (we’re renting now).

I don’t even want to think about how much fuel it cost to move our stuff across the country, but I know we wouldn’t be proud of it. (One thing that’s clear to us now is we have waaay too much stuff and need to consolidate a bit.) Then there was the fuel to move both our cars across the country (along with ourselves) -- although, that may be balanced out in due time since my commute was cut in half and we now live in a walkable community.

We didn’t have a place to live picked out before we arrived in the area, so we arranged to stay at a bed & breakfast for a good rate. This was one brighter spot in our moving process -- not only was it much nicer than a hotel (it was a little cottage next to the main house, with many surrounding acres for the dog to run), but a hotel would have changed our towels and sheets every day whether we wanted them to or not. We let the owner know that we were just fine, and we avoided the unnecessary extra laundry and cleaning. There was also a full kitchen in the cottage so we were able to eat a bit more normally.

In the end, moving was a major blow to our sustainability, but it was necessary to ensure both our future health, happiness, and continued path to living the rest of our lives sustainably. Hopefully our move from Florida suburbia to Midwest farm country will be the best thing for our family and the environment -- but we’re already pretty sure that will be true on both accounts.