It appears that my daughter is struggling with her situation in Michigan and will be moving in with us in Alabama, along with her 7 and 4 year old, until she can get set up down here with a job and place to live. SO - we need to figure out the best way to get her moved.
When my wife and I moved, our company agreed to pay for professional movers. So they packed, and also stored, our stuff until we got a house and then they moved the stuff into the new house. This will probably not be an option this time simply due to the cost. I assume.
About 850 miles, FWIW. The plan is to move the kids beds, toys, everyone’s clothes, etc. that are needed while they live with us in a caravan of a van and an SUV and a pick-up truck. The other stuff will need to be packed up and moved down here and stored until she finds a place, and then moved to that new place. I’m guessing, just a guess, 6 months. Hoping for less.
I’ll get an estimate from a moving company if for no other reason than to get the cubic feet estimate of stuff moved. We’re going to try to minimize what gets moved, e.g. sell the two big sofa, the big cherry entertainment center, etc. Hopefully such that what is left would fit in one 16 foot pod.
Is the pod approach easiest and most cost effective? One issue when I look at the videos: she does not have a driveway that would accommodate a pod - it’s not level and very narrow. And the street is narrow. I need help thinking of options! Thanks
Given the possible storage time, a pod sounds like the best option. I know UHaul will store pods in a secure site (for some price of course) so you wouldn’t need to block driveway, etc. It is just a matter of packing right. I think they even let you have access to the pod, so pack possible needs at the front. Last time I looked, maybe 4 years ago, that all was possible, but it still isn’t cheap.
We did this, also when moving the hell out of Michigan ;)
All this is true, but the cost is significant if you’re going to store them for long. We ended up eating a bunch of money because it took us way longer to get into a new house than we’d planned or hoped.
$160/mo x 6+ month compared to the loss of $$ if she had a garage sale and then had to replace the necessary items. Depends on what is being considered for storing.
I would just hire movers tbh - I’ve been moving and not using them and it’s kind of a slow burn disaster. At least I can drive 5 hours one way during the weekends. Over 800 miles, you want to be done the first time.
If for some reason you don’t hire movers but would rather drive yourselves, be sure you can hire manual labor to move the large furniture out of the house, onto the trailer / moving van, and then the reverse when you get to your destination. If you find you either can’t or can’t figure how to get that manual labor help, then hire a moving company and eat the cost, as high as it will surely be. Don’t go half and half like I just did.
Worse comes to worse sell all her furniture on Craigslist if you can neither hire a moving company nor find a way to move it. But you need to be serious about moving big furniture and if you can safely manage it - or even are able to manage it, and what you’re going to do if you can’t. Also the cost of moving today just keeps going up and pretty quickly get close to the cost of consumer grade furniture anway - but otoh there’s apparently a “furniture shortage” in the country right now? So just because you can budget buying new furniture doesn’t mean there’s going to be nice furniture to buy.
Those U-Haul pods are quite small, too. We had six of them packed pretty full with all our stuff (including furniture, which tbf we didn’t have a ton of) minus what we needed to function while couch-surfing. One kid, three-bedroom house, and we’re definitely not hoarders.
Yeah, it was nice on our own move a couple of years ago to have professional movers pack and wrap everything and load it on the truck, then they stored it until we bought the new house, and they moved everything into the house (We unpacked the boxes ourselves.) But we’ve been married 40 years and have a ton of “stuff” including furniture.
For my daughter we will try to sell some of the bigger things like two big sofas, a nice big (heavy) cherry china entertainment center that my wife and I used until our TV became too big for it, and be judicious on things like bookcases, which can be easily purchased again. My wife is heading back up there and I think she and my daughter will decide what needs to be moved, then have the video estimate of cubic feet and weight from a professional mover that we used and an estimate. Including storage. That will give us the cubic feet to estimate a pod/container. Then we will weigh the pros and cons of the DIY pod approach vs. the mover.
My move this summer (Iowa to MN only about 300 miles) went well with movers. My advice based on that: look for local companies. The place I went with is affiliated with one of the national chains, but gave me a really good deal–several thousand less than I was quoted by national movers.
Thanks. We will be moving her from MI to AL so that may restrict our option but even in our company paid move from IA to AL I found the biggest names all had the exact estimates (I suspect one company owns them) and someone else we were happy with had much lower rates and storage rates.
