So the good news is, I learnt how to lose 3 kilos in as many
weeks without a single gym session. For the first time in an ice age, I’m down
to a very trim 72.4kg.
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| Nice feet pal! |
The bad news is – to get to this level I had to practically
move an entire three bedroom house. And since it’s such a laborious pain in the
rear end, I truly wouldn’t recommend this process to anyone...
But if you are insan- I mean still keen to try this non-gym,
non-exercise, roughly same diet workout then here’s how I managed to do it:
1.
PUT EVERYTHING YOU OWN IN A BOX AND THEN MOVE
THAT BOX TO THE FURTHEST PART OF THE HOUSE YOU CAN FIND.
Given how much stuff we had to pack (and
you never realize how much junk you have until you go through the entire boxing
process) this step required a lot of lifting. Rather than leaving the boxes in
the rooms they belonged to, I figured it’d far easier for the removalists to
quote us on our job if all of our junk was in the same place – namely the back
shed. Unsurprisingly there were a lot of boxes – a few light ones but mostly
heavy (yep, we were hoarders in the last 8 years) so it did build up a lot of
sweat moving lots of heavy stuff from one side of the house to the other.
2.
ONCE IT’S IN THERE, REARRANGE EVERYTHING SO YOU
CAN DO SOME NICE MEASUREMENTS
We got a moving quote based on 22 metres
cubed and part of me had a slight suspicion that we might have a couple more
cubes worth of gear than quoted. So there was a busy afternoon and part of the
night in the shed where I stacked everything perfectly like a master playing
Tetris, in a rough shape of moving truck dimensions, just to see if were over.
We’d just made it thankfully but year, another full day of lifting there.
3.
DRINK A TONNE OF WATER
About 1.8 litres a day roughly. Sounds a
lot but after a couple of hours of throwing stuff about I’d happily chug
through a 600ml bottle in record time.
4.
NOW THAT IT’S IN THE STORAGE SHED, GET THINGS
OUT SLOWLY.
I had a genius idea originally that even
the biggest of our items could fit in the back of my Nissan Stagea wagon with
the back seats down – it turns out both the couch and our queen size mattress didn’t
like that idea at all. (Luckily I ratchet clamped the mattress down to the roof
racks and drove it very carefully home to our new place.) I also discovered
that while I love the war wagon for its back capacity, it’d take at least 30
trips up and back to clear out both lockers entirely. I do enjoy a challenge,
but this was madness. And so after a couple of trips getting our beds home and
even wrestling a fridge into a station wagon (quite a workout) we figured it
was time to bring in the big guns...
5.
HIRE A VAN, END UP WITH A TRUCK
I’d booked a long cab van to make short
work of clearing out the storage sheds in one day. The hire group soon called
up and explained that they were all out of vans but for the same price, I could
have a 3 tonne truck to play with instead and yes, I could drive it on a normal
license. So the theory was – on the day of picking up the truck we do 1 trip,
throw everything in the back, unload, have a spot of lunch.
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| Funny looking van... |
You’re
an idiot Migo!
I got the truck and it took two hours to
get through half of the stuff we had (and haphazardly take up most of the room
in the back of the truck) and then another hour of unloading because unlike
when we got it put into the shed, there weren’t two man mountains who could carry a couch in each hand doing the
grunt work. Mostly it was me and there was a tonne of grunting involved in
every single moment of work. Plus our
lockers were on the second floor of the complex, deep in the guts of it –
meaning many slow rides up and down in the freight elevator. Since the new place came complete with the
worlds steepest driveway, a trolly was also needed so my wife went off to buy a
cheapie...only to find that one tire was inflated, the other flat as a tack –
which made the wrestling shit uphill job so much more interesting and challenge.
But by 6:30pm (when we started at 10) we had all of our stuff...in the garage.
The two car garage had now become one + a mountain of boxes, crates and packing
tape. But hey, we were out of the lockers and had all our stuff so that was a
start.
6.
MOVE IN, UNPACK, UNPACK AND MOVE IN SOME MORE.
Thankfully this step was a little less fast
paced but ultimately still required some lifting. Most of it’s been done now
and throughout the process we’ve marvelled at the fact that for a brand new
house on the rental market, it came with a surprising lack of storage space. Or
maybe we still have too much junk...actually come to think of it, now that I’ve
lifted most of it at some stage through the last three weeks I think it’s a
given: We just have way too much junk...
7.
WEIGH YOURSELF
The challenge was to get everything up here
and moved in, in a cost effective and rational manner. And it kind of happened
that way after we stopped doing endless trips in the wagon and hired a truck
for the day instead. (Genius moment). However the by-product of all that
sweating, lifting, cursing, grunting and howling operation was finally digging
the scales out and discovering that I was now the lightest I’ve been in a
stupidly long time.
So I still have all my junk, but I’ve lost
three kilos of my fat content which was an added bonus. However since I have
now brought up my collection of weight plates and bars, I feel it’s far more
practical to go back to traditional methods of keeping trim. And for the record
- the next time we move I’ll definitely be
paying someone else to do it to make it far easier and saner on our selves. And
I’ll leave it up to them if they want to thank me for making them 3 kilos
lighter at the end of it..
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