Ours went wrong in three places, and none of them were the parts we had worried about. They were the arrangements we made calmly, months in advance, and then stopped thinking about because they felt settled.
We had planned this move for years, carefully, and by the time we crossed into Portugal it had cost us thousands of pounds more than it needed to and we were sleeping in one cleaned room of a house we could not live in.
I want to write that down plainly, because the accounts of this stage I read beforehand were not much use to me. They describe the difficulty in general terms and then arrive somewhere sunny, and you finish reading with the impression that it was hard in a way that will not apply to you.
Nothing failed at the difficult part
That is the thing I did not expect. Not the complicated parts. We had worked on those for years and they held.
What gave way were three arrangements we had made calmly, months in advance, and then stopped thinking about because they felt settled.
A removals arrangement, agreed with somebody we knew, at a fair price, on a date. He rang a week before to say he could not do it. He had done nothing wrong and he did not create our problem. He revealed it, which was that we had one option and no second one, and had been in that position for weeks without noticing, because it felt finished.
A house, taken from Scotland on photographs and one short video, because the completion date was fixed and at some point you have to choose something. We drove four days to it and the windows did not close and the wind came through the rooms and out the other side of the building, and there was water running down the walls and standing on the kitchen floor. Nobody lied to us. A camera cannot record cold, or damp, or the sound of wind through a frame.
And a weight limit for the shipment, agreed at fifteen hundred kilos, which we were confident was generous. It was not. The overage cost us two thousand eight hundred and fifty pounds and arrived a month behind us, and the reason is not that we were careless. It is that possessions spread through a house are invisible. Your eye counts a wardrobe as one object rather than as one object plus ninety kilos of clothing, and it counts a kitchen as a kitchen. Two thirds of our load was in our heads. The third that was not was the expensive one.
A move does not fail at the difficult parts. It fails at the parts you decided were finished.
The week does not make room for you
Our dog died a week before we left. He was coming with us, and the date we left the country had been arranged around his paperwork, and he became unwell after a booster he needed in order to travel.
There is no arrangement of words that makes that sit comfortably in a piece about moving house and I am not going to look for one. What I can say is what happens when something like that lands in a week with no room in it. The boxes are still there. The completion date is still there. The children still need breakfast, and the youngest was one and did not understand any of it and wanted to be picked up, so you pick him up. There is no hour in a week like that where you are permitted to stop and take it in. It waits.
The removals call came about two days later.
What the stage actually asks of you
I had assumed, before we did this, that moving would ask for courage. It did not, or not in any form I recognised.
When there is genuinely no way backwards, you stop spending energy on whether this is fair or whether you can bear it, because neither question leads anywhere, and everything you have goes into the only direction still standing. I do not remember sitting down that week. I remember phone calls and a laptop open on a box.
The same thing happened on the night we stood in that house. Sitting with any of it would have cost us the evening and returned nothing, so we set it down and asked what was next instead. What is next is the only question that helps.
It is not bravery. The alternatives disappear one by one until only the forward one is there, and then you walk into it, and afterwards people call it strength.
The alternatives disappear one by one until only the forward one is standing, and afterwards people call it strength.
Everything went wrong at a distance
Here is the pattern underneath all three, and it took me a while to see it.
The house was chosen at a distance and it was wrong. The removals were arranged at a distance and the weight was wrong. And the single thing that went right went right because we were physically inside the country, with a car and a phone and a free morning, able to stand in a room at nine the next day and decide in front of the person letting it.
Distance is what makes a move expensive. Being close is what makes it solvable.
If I could change one thing about how we did this, it would not be any individual decision. It would be the shape of the whole thing. Get into the country early and lightly, with as few permanent commitments made from abroad as you can manage, and leave the large decisions until you are near enough to touch them.
You will still get things wrong. We did, and we had planned for years. But the mistakes you make from inside the country are the kind you can fix in a morning, and the ones you make from outside it are the kind that meet you at the door.
We found the house we live in now on our second morning here. We asked whether we could move in that day, and we did.