A Moving Guide
For those who learn very slowly
Was it that day in June when I attempted to walk by foot from our storage to a Goodwill store in 120F Arizona nuclear blasting sunshine and almost died from heat exhaustion and took shelter in a Carniceria?
Or the time I was under so much stress that my doctor had prescribed steroids to stave off asthma-like attacks, and I became a female Hulk — The She-Hulk — and used the steroid-super-strength to lift hundreds of moving boxes as if they were feather-filled pillows.
Perhaps it was the time I swore up and down I would let the moving crew do the heavy lifting, and then proceeded to stay on my feet for about 18 hours straight lifting and carrying more boxes than I can recall and ended up walking 15 km. Oh, and the following day I drove from Phoenix to Bakersfield while having nonstop full blown panic attacks due to exhaustion.
Moving brings out the beast in us all, doesn’t it? And no matter how well you plan, you can know one this for sure; it will all go to hell at some point. Hence the beast mode needs to be activated.
Oh, hi, you’re here looking for moving tips? Well then, let’s begin.
No, they won’t come and help you, so just find paid movers and leave your friends alone. You still have to become a despicable control freak during moving day. Each time you move you learn a few more helpful tricks, and each time you make some major mistakes that you swear you will never repeat. Trust me, you will make an even more obvious mistake next time you move. It’s not a bug, it’s a feature. Oh wait, you actually have friends who help you move? You must be subscribing to another simulation because none of us ever have friends like that.
Moving is like buying a car. They try to charge you for anything and everything. One moving crew packed a small decorative pillow in a huge box in hopes of being able to charge me more. I saw it and called them on it. What you need to do is pre-pack and label everything. This will take roughly two more days than you think, because there are always surprises. You have to be the boss on moving day. You have to be an emotionless beast of burden, pretty much. Monitior, supervise, check, triple-check, question, verify, hydrate and hydrate the moving crew.
Heavy duty file boxes with lids are some of the best moving boxes ever. If you’re coordinated and can assemble and disassemble foldable boxes in between moves, you can reuse these boxes many times. The reason these boxes are good, is the size. They’re light, they have holes on both ends which make them easy to lift, and they are perfectly stackable. Many moving boxes are way too large, and almost impossible to carry once filled. File boxes are perfect size. The only thing that can cause a bit of a problem is when the moving crew asks how many boxes you have and you say 200-300. Another common trick is simply to fill large, industrial sized, trash bags with clothes, pillows and bedlinen. Leave the clothes hangers on.
We’ve moved around half a dozen times and finding an affordable and good moving truck and crew is like searching for the Holy Grail. Especially the affordable part. Paying a lot for a good move is easy. But finding a so called budget friendly mover requires patience and a couple of weeks worth of research.
Here’s one of the more memorable moving stories:
When we moved into our Bay Area tiny house, we had to wait over a week for all our furniture and everything to arrive. They couldn’t give a more exact window of time than that for a drop-off date. So we slept on an air mattress and bought a foldable poker table and two chairs from Target and set up our new life.
One day (not on the day they told us) a very long transcontinental truck shows up with our stuff. We were of course the last drop-off they had, so all our stuff had been bounced around and mushed nicely by several moving crews while searching for other people’s boxes and things in the trailer. Nice. Two men show up at our door step.
One was a frenetic and demanding moving guy already fed up with his current situation before he had even begun. He was the main guy. The thing was that this was the Bay Area. It is very difficult to find workers and he had only found one man. The man we saw standing beside him was an old man. A man who should be sitting in a rocking chair and smoking a cigar while watching TV. This was the moving crew. The old man grimaced a little. We could see pain emanating from his body at the mere action of breathing.
What proceeded was something out of a comedy. The main man refused to park his huge truck outside our house. Our house stood on absolutely flat ground and the street had clear visibility in both directions. We had relatively few items to unload considering we were moving into a tiny house. But the man refused. He was pointing down the street around a corner. That’s where he was going to park, but only if my husband paid him $200. See where this is going?
So now the odd couple of movers had to walk 200 yards with every single load instead of 10 yards. My usual moving strategies include carefully labeling and color coding all boxes and items for easy drop-off in each “zone”. All movers know how this works. All, except this oddball crew. They turned off their understanding of most things I told them. One was mad as hell and mostly grunted. The other one dropped most of our furniture on the curb so that three or four pieces broke and I had to throw them away.
They dropped boxes of paper in the street so we had to scramble like hysteric seagulls to collect the folders amidst oncoming traffic. The two low steps leading up to our house proved to be too much for the old man. He could not lift furniture that high, and the angry mover grabbed the whole piece and bolted in with it and slammed it onto our brand new floor. I winced and bit my tongue.
I wanted time to fast forward. I wanted Grandpa mover man to go home and rest, and Angry Man to finally be finished hurling out boxes into our small house. Our combined living room and kitchen was a pile of debris. That debris was our stuff. I have blocked my memory of how the two man moving crew managed to get our mattress and bed into our place, and perhaps it’s for the best.
I’ve always firmly believed in setting up a cozy environment as soon as you’ve moved in. I now remember that we didn’t buy that Target poker table right away. We ate on a table made of a very large cardboard box covered with a Greek beach towel. I picked the mini-roses in the garden outside. A cute breakfast raises the spirit and removes the frosty memory of sleeping on a freezing cold air mattress the night before.
So wait, what have we really learned from all this? Let me attempt to distill it down to three things:
No matter what you do, always add at least $2000-3000 to your moving costs. At least.
Unless you’re wealthy (in which case I have no clue why you’re even reading this because you certainly don’t need my advice) you can expect to end up with broken furniture, scratched cars (oh, I forgot to tell you about that time we shipped one car and it pretty much got keyed), overtime costs (5-6 hours extra is common, so don’t even blink when that happens, because it will happen.)
You will say: “Next time we move we will never do this or that again!” And I am here to tell you that the “this or that” that goes to hell next time you move is something new. It’s always something new and unexpected. Something always goes wrong. And that’s when you just have to dig into those extra $2000-3000 and laugh. Laugh and be grateful that you’re alive. You will have a great story to tell later on and even if you didn’t quite learn your moving lesson this time, you will sure as heck do it the right way next time. Right?
What’s your craziest moving story? Please make us laugh or cry!
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