Moving Across The Country
It wasn't either of our first times moving across the country. I'm originally from Chicago and Mike, from Atlanta. We met in California years after we both journeyed to the West Coast in pursuit of a career in the film industry, and well, that Cali beach life. However, moving West was an easier mission for us back then when both of us only had a handful of things we were moving with, filling our cars full and driving it all with us. This time will be a bit more difficult.. we had since built a life out West together and accumulated enough stuff to fill a two bedroom house. Not to mention, we had a million plants that filled the home and we weren't about to leave our plant babies behind after years of nurturing them and watching them grow! So, the 2282 mile trip back across to country, to the East Coast, was going to take a bit more planning and definitely a different strategy.
The easiest way to move across the country would be to hire a full service moving company like the reputable North American, Mayflower, or Atlas Van Lines, who would come pack your stuff up, we would then ship our car(s) and fly to our destination. But this method is also the most expensive option and we weren't trying to spend too much to make the move, so we had to get a little creative. Yeah it's more work, but time is money, and as we were unemployed, doing this work was like getting paid and we were fine with that. After all, the goal was to save money and spend it on a new property that we could plant some roots in. Obviously, by packing our own stuff up, we'd save a lot there and since we had over a month to get the packing done, we decided to do a little packing each day and it would be done before we knew it.
We were leasing 2 cars at the time, and we definitely didn't want to drive across the country separately, so the first questions in planning this trip were, "should we ship one of the cars, and drive the other?" "Which one gets better gas mileage? Which one has more cargo space? Which one is more comfortable? Which one is faster? Well, before we had to answer all those questions, we realized that both of our leases were ending very soon, so we decided to turn one of them in and drive the other. Boom, that took care of the cars! We turned in the VW GLI, that one would have probably gotten us to Georgia a bit quicker... but luckily the Suburu Impreza was equally as comfortable and had tons of space in the hatchback trunk.
So, with the cars in order, I started researching moving companies. This part was a bit overwhelming to be honest. There are SO many options. I started with the obvious ones, like U-Haul, Enterprise & Budget, but if we were going to rent a moving truck, that means we would have to tow the car behind and also ride in a bulky, uncomfortable moving truck for nearly a week as we crawled across the country. I like to travel light and be able to move around freely and park easily in a vehicle that gets good gas mileage and towing a car behind a big moving truck would be the opposite of that! The thought of that alone stressed me out, so I quickly scratched that idea!
This brings us to the next option, U-Pack, a company that lets you load your already-packed boxes and furniture into a big semi truck and they drive it out for you. This option sounded pretty good, it was cheaper than the full service option, but they are a freight company, which means that they may or may not only carry your stuff, but possibly other people's stuff as well, with a divider wall that you lock in between each load. You only pay for how much space you use in the truck which can save you money, but after calculating how much space we might need, we realized that we didn't need anywhere near 26ft in a trailer and that we could rent a moving pod or two and have more than enough room. The delivery times were also longer with the trailer option, as they have to make many stops along the way to deliver whatever else is in that same container. Not to mention parking that trailer on the street for a few days while we packed sounded like a huge headache, so we went back and researched all the moving pod rentals.
PODS was the obvious first company that came to mind, remembering all the times I saw those PODS sitting in people's driveways. I was surprised at how expensive they were to rent! The sizes were limited to Small (8ft), Medium (12ft) and Large (18ft) containers which seemed like a good range, but when we started calculating how much stuff we had, we fell in between two sizes. This meant that we'd either be paying more for the large POD and also our stuff would sit a bit loose inside of it, and with a trip across the country, I'd be happier to know everything is snug inside. Less wiggle room means less bumping around and less damage to the bigger items like the wooden furniture. Not only that, but the PODS let you use the container for as long as you need and charge you for the full week after landing. We didn't it that long, so we would end up paying for the extra time for it to sit there empty in the driveway. Not our best option...
So, we looked into U-Haul's U-Box. These only come in one size and they encourage getting as many as you need. They also offer storage so you can store your stuff if you can't ship it directly to your new location due to timing, like if you were renting a house or apartment and the dates didn't line up perfect, you can easily store your stuff for a few weeks or months. As helpful as this sounds, we weren't in that situation, so it wasn't a selling point for us. Another thing that worried me with the U-Box was the quality of the box... although they claim they are weather resistant and made of premium plywood, I've heard of break-ins as they sit on the street overnight and knowing we would be packing them up over the course of a few days, it seemed like an unnecessary risk to put all of our possessions up for grabs. It didn't ease my mind, we definitely prefer a steel container over plywood.
1-800-Pack-Rat was another company that offered moving containers. We compared the two, but again we fell somewhere in between container sizes. They offer 3 sizes but the medium size (12ft) was only for local moves, not cross-country moves. The other two sizes were 8 ft and 16ft, Which was too small, and way too big. They also made you rent the container for the month... this wasn't our best option. Another perk about using U-Pack over 1-800-Pack-Rat was that you didn't need to put down a deposit with U-Pack, and only paid in full once the delivery was made to the final destination. With 1-800-Pack-Rat, they required up front deposits, and multiple payments along the way. This just sounded complicated...
After requesting quotes from many of these companies,U-Pack actually came in the most budget friendly, quoting us just under $3000 for the move. Well under the $8000 quotes we were getting from the full service companies, and even the $6000 quotes from PODS. The quote from 1-800-Pack-Rate came back around $1000 higher than U-Box, so the decision was obvious, U-Pack it is. We made a quick and easy reservation on their website, choosing the drop off, pick up dates and delivery dates. They give you up to 3 days to load them up which was leisurely and the cool thing we discovered was they only deliver on week days, so we got it dropped of on a Thursday and they picked it up the following Monday which means we had it for 5 days and didn't have to pay for the weekend days. This was very helpful so that we didn't rush the packing job. Knowing they would be driven across the country, we wanted everything to be padded (with our pillows and blankets), tied down with rope, and properly wrapped up so minimize any damages.
Mindful Moving Tricks
Something I also wanted to note while making this decision in which method would be best to make the move seamless and easy was lead by my Eco-conscious mindset. I always try to make my packing footprint lighter by reusing cardboard boxes and packing with newspaper and very little - or zero - plastic. With a full service moving company, I know they use brand new cardboard boxes, tons of bubble wrap, they wrap the furniture in plastic and use tons of tape.. no thank you. So in order to up cycle boxes, we went around to the local shops, mainly the grocery stores and asked them for boxes they were finished with, after unpacking their shipments. These boxes were awesome, huge, in good condition, and we mostly only used the dry goods boxes which were as good as new.
We also went to the liquor store and lucked out big time when we asked for boxes, the guy working there told us he was saving a bunch for the last week for someone who was also moving, but they never came back to grab them, so he handed us a huge stack of beer boxes. These were great because they were a bit smaller than the grocery boxes. You need a variety of sizes when packing up a house! I ended up using these for books. Books are heavy, and if you fill a huge box with books, well.. its too heavy (for me) and makes moving much more back breaking.
The only other boxes we needed were boxes to transport our plants in. Luckily, we had been getting CSA deliveries each week from the local farms that would deliver all of our produce directly from local farms. These were very sturdy boxes that you could stack and they had holes on each side to ensure the produce wouldn't spoil. These were absolutely perfect for our small house plants, as they would hold them in place during the drive and also let them breathe on their journey. These would be the last items to pack up, so I just collected these boxes each week and when the time came, we had just enough to fit everything. We were ready to move!
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