Moving house: here layeth my pile; look upon it and weep | Jack Marshall's column

Seeing your life in pile form is a pretty sobering thing.
Glamour, glamour, glamour: The PileGlamour, glamour, glamour: The Pile
Glamour, glamour, glamour: The Pile

This is a reality which struck me recently when moving house, a process which necessitated a period of squatting at my dad’s house and kindly increasingly his weekly food bill by 33%. It also necessitated my commandeering roughly 40% of his garage for my mound of things.

Mid-way through the careful construction of the pile, it struck me rather profoundly that these were the things which I had knowingly deemed as pretty important. On some emotional or stylistically subliminal level, this was the stuff which defined me.

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And here it all was: in a big mound on the floor. To paraphrase Nadia from Netflix’s Russian Doll: “What a concept.”

We capitalists love to hoard things. Unless you took the aggressively joy-free life lessons espoused by Marie Kondo very much to heart, even if you think you don’t like to hoard things, on some level you do. We stuff-hungry lot collect odds and sods like a magpie pilfers all things shiny: enthusiastically and probably without realising what we’re doing.

I am a pretty thrifty man who has never lived in a house big enough to fill with a great number of things, but until you strap on the marigolds and dig in, you don’t quite realise just how much Stuff™ you have.

A Stuff-cull was required. In a clean-slate stock-take kind of way, this was enjoyable. But at the end of the day, my slow-cooker was still balanced on my cricket bag, my IKEA bag full of shoes was overflowing, and I was sure that I had too many coats.

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And not to flog a dead horse, but there’s something uniquely deflating about seeing the sum total of your worldly possessions delicately stacked up amidst oil stains on the concrete floor and a Jenga tower of lawn-mower parts, reels of hosepipe, and tools which look like they once belonged to Isambard Kingdom Brunel.

Here layeth my pile. Look upon it, and weep.

But moving is still a whirlwind of unpredictable excitement and novel newness. Your mission is to move this pile into a place where it will suddenly cease to be a pile and dissolve into a new home like tea leaves in a brew. There’s satisfaction in picking apart the pile and a life-hack happy pang every time you find an intuitive spot for every one of your possessions in a new place.

But this is just the first step of moving. The things in it make it your house; making it a home is a whole other column.

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