Six days, six weeks, six months… No matter how much time you give yourself and how much planning you do, when it comes to a big life event, it still ends up feeling like everything happens all at once.

June 2020 was a month of maximum overdrive. When we decided that March to move back East in the middle of the first global pandemic in a century, we approached the process like a marathon – one measured step at a time, or in our case, one box at a time. That was the mantra I adopted early on, and one I started spouting around the house to anyone who would listen, even when I was talking to myself. Which was often. It’s simplistic and it’s cliched, but “one box at a time” helped me stay grounded and focused on the task at hand, and more importantly, it helped me avoid peeking at the long scroll of a to-do list we had in front of us. There were big, broad strokes and specific little details, with one often dictating the pace of the other, and the trick was to not get overwhelmed no matter how fast or slow we were progressing. It mostly worked.

June brought a series of wind sprints in the middle of the marathon. Up to that point, every step we took – be it taping up another box or booking another home repair – was made with a summer 2020 move in mind, but with no guarantee it would actually happen. But when my wife, Erica, got the green light for permanent remote work on June 11, the exhibition run turned into a real race, and we kicked into high gear.

We started that evening by reconnecting with our realtor; two days later, on the morning of June 13, Andrea was sitting at our dining room table with the listing paperwork. She also scheduled her photographer to visit that afternoon and take exterior shots of the house, which spurred a mad dash to tidy up the front, rake the lawn, trim the tree and otherwise paint the impression of a neat and orderly life in our home – at least from the street view. Most of this work took place during a rare morning rainstorm because of course it did. As I lopped off branches with the pruner, dime-size water droplets pelting my face, for the first time it felt like we might not make it across the finish line. We had a timeline to keep if we were going to get to Ohio before the start of the new school year, and with two months remaining on the clock, doubt was creeping in – but I didn’t let it do me in. Outside the world of metaphors, it’s physically impossible to stay head-down and keep your chin up, but that’s the headspace I tried to maintain. It mostly worked.

Fortunately, we had spent the spring packing dozens of boxes – one at a time, of course – and getting rid of crap that we didn’t want to carry with us 2,000 miles across the country. By June, thrift store donation runs had become weekly errands, and Erica had taken to Facebook Marketplace to sell off bric-a-brac that was too old or too bruised to justify bringing with us. We sorted and sold some of her late father’s western wear and gave the rest of his clothing – 12 bags of it – to a homeless shelter. A 17-year-old creeper van sitting lifeless in our driveway was donated to Radio Boise for a tax write-off. Some serious skin was being shed.

One of my big projects was cleaning out the garage, historically one of my favorite warm-weather jobs. For as much of a collector as I was, I’ve always been prone to purging, and fortunately I married a fellow Virgo who shared this liberating impulse. Spending hours in a dusty garage ridding our lives of domestic debris with a cold beer and classic rock as my companions was a near-spiritual experience. And in this case it played a vital role in the moving process: As more and more boxes migrated from the house to our garage, we found ourselves with less and less space to maneuver in there, and we still had mountains of stuff to shift out of the house. Especially after the staging company paid us a visit.

Andrea had strongly recommended we stage the house. Home staging, which apparently has been a thing since the early ’70s, is a fascinating science to me, something I scoffed at in the past in the same what’s-the-point way that I have scoffed at low-fat Twinkies and dog apparel. It seemed strange to turn our house into a film set for a life we didn’t live and one likely to never be lived inside these walls; inevitably, someone else would move in and fill it up with their shit, so why the false pretense? But I get it – nobody wants to see how you lived in the space; they want to imagine how they would live in it, and the point of staging was to create a neutral, breathable, inviting environment. A clean slate. We were looking for our own 2,000 miles away.

Staging, as it were, had crossed our minds before Andrea suggested it, but following months of epic purging, we figured maybe we’d move a few more things to the garage, hide the rest of our shame in the closets and call it good. That’s what you’d call the amateur approach. The professional approach, conversely, proved to be a comprehensive takedown of our interior design aesthetic. I took notes during the initial June 15 walkthrough with the stager, and “clear everything” is written for multiple rooms. Even the vintage turntable, which I casually mentioned might play nicely off the mid-century modern architecture, didn’t make the cut. Few things did. Later that day, when we received a follow-up email with official marching orders from the stager, we were instructed, with the exception of our beds, to pre-pack all furniture, artwork and accessories; clear all countertops and surfaces; and remove most curtains, bedding and lamps. For the spare bedrooms, the email bluntly stated, “clear as much as possible,” followed by a smiley-face emoji to soften the blow or whatever. Smiley-face or no, the message was clear: Our life didn’t look good.

To make that life look good would require hiding even more of our stuff while somehow keeping our one-car garage from giving off mad hoarder vibes to prospective buyers. So the next day we contacted Pods. This ended up being one of our best decisions – not just for the home sale but for the big move back East, too. When we moved from New Hampshire to Boise in 2006, we did it on the cheap, which meant a shared semi trailer that was loaded on a train for a rickety 2,700-mile journey and a bunch of banged-up belongings on the back end. We vowed not to repeat that mistake next time we moved, and Pods offered a reasonably affordable option with climate-controlled storage and train-free transportation, and it just so happened that their nearest Northeast Ohio facility was located one town over from Hudson in Streetsboro.

On June 18, three days after the stager’s visit and only one week after Erica talked with her boss, Andrea pounded a “coming soon” sign into our front yard. We had made sure to pause and take deep breaths throughout the process, but the pace was dizzying nonetheless. Meanwhile, the summer COVID surge was, well, surging. Idaho was quickly turning into one of the worst places to be in North America, and on June 22, as we wrapped a five-piece sectional couch in plastic to store in the pod that had just replaced the creeper van in the driveway, the news hit that Boise and Ada County would be moving back a stage in the phased reopening. As exciting as our move was, with a major virus spike as the backdrop, the process was a bit disconcerting, much more than it would have been in quote-unquote normal times. From Mike the plumber to Andrea the realtor to emoji-slinging stagers, our house played host to a rotating cast of potential germ hosts – some masked, some not – who were helping us finish the race while also risking our health.

On the morning of June 24, as Ada County officially regressed to Stage 3, a Pods driver pulled into the driveway to pick up our first fully-loaded pod. One day prior, we had professional movers come over to pack the pod the right way – as in, not our way. The Tetris job they did was amazing, and most of our stuff would make it to Ohio in one piece. We had successfully stalled the stagers for a few days to get this first pod out of our lives, which was easier said than done. Not only were we sprinting to clear the decks inside the house to prep for the staging, we were also making big decisions on the fly, knowing that whatever went into the pod would be leaving our lives for at least two months. Turns out we didn’t miss most of it, and the bare-bones living arrangement that followed inspired even more purging when we made it to the other side in Ohio.

The moment the Pods guy backed into the driveway, the staging company pulled up in front of the house – and much earlier than scheduled. Inside, meanwhile, we were frantically sliding boxes and other odds and ends into the living room to transfer to the garage when we could get to it, but that couldn’t happen until the pod was out of the way, and as it happened, we were still fast-walking the last of our stuff out of the house as the stagers started hauling in theirs. I had no idea what qualified as “inviting” in the staging world, but as a steady stream of plastic plants, static artwork and grayish furniture entered our front door, it was evident that “inviting” equaled “innocuous.” I still don’t know what was wrong with our bed linens and right with theirs, but I was capable of wrapping my head around the logic of matching nightstands, and once everything was in its right place, I had to admit that our house felt unnaturally spacious and looked sexy-awesome.

Regardless, settling in that first night felt a tad unsettling, though it came with a sigh of relief (and a stiff drink) following the flurry of activity it took us to reach this point. In that moment, and for the rest of our time in our home that would soon be just a house, it felt like we were living in a showroom, which must be part of the point. Our daughter, Magnolia, remarked that it didn’t smell like our house anymore. Any lingering doubt I had about the psychology of staging was erased after I took a good whiff of the living room air and agreed with her.

When we awoke under borrowed linens the next morning – two weeks after Erica got approved for permanent remote work and exactly three months after the start of the shutdown – our home of 14 years officially hit the market.

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