Danielle Blog

logistics of moving

Thank you to all of you for your kind comments and support on my “Changes afoot” post. Since I wrote that, there are several things about which I’ve debated blogging. One of them is dealing with plagiarism at school in a group science paper in Intro Bio. However, right now, I feel less inclined to blog about school stuff and more inclined to blog about home stuff.

For the past couple of weeks, beginning Easter weekend (or maybe even going back about 6 weeks to Spring Break), I’ve been dealing with moving logistics. Can I just say up front that trying to find the right way to move for my particular needs has been filled with frustration, angst, and now relief?

Jenski very kindly talked to me on the phone to describe her experience with using a pod-based system for moving. I went looking online and thus began the frustration. One place would say that my move would be $1500, another $2000, another $2500 and another $3000. Some of those differences were from the same company depending on whether I used their generic “2 bedroom apartment” worth of furniture or if I actually filled out a checklist of stuff! It varied by $1000!!! How can I make a decision based on that? Part of it was that some of the checklists wanted me to estimate cubic feet of stuff. And yes, I’m in science, and I have a pretty good sense of volume. But honestly, I don’t know how many cubic feet of linens I will take with me. Or cubic feet of clothes. Or books. Heaven help me with regards to my books. I figured out that I have 22 hard back (pleasure reading) and 120 paperbacks. And I’ve got about 12 feet of science textbooks and lecture material. TWELVE FEET. egads. That stuff is heavy. I can tell you from trying to lug home 4 or 5 when I need to prepare a lecture.
I’ve also got to get all of that from my office to my house too. Thank goodness for carts. I may have to take it in stages or my poor car will drag on the ground!

In the end, the only way I finalized my method of moving was to have a couple of traditional moving companies come to our house and look at my stuff and give me an honest-to-goodness estimate.
End result: I am going to accept an offer from one of those companies to have them load up a truck on May 21. I’m going to have them pack my breakables so that if something is broken, they have to replace it. But I’ll pack the rest myself.

Yes, May 21. very soon. and a bit scary. But in order to get the most optimal apartment, my lease starts on May 7. And I’m trying to not totally waste the money I’m spending on an apartment for May.

And I suppose I didn’t mention it, but in order to do all of these moving estimations, I had to first inventory our stuff and discuss with HB who would keep which things. The discussion itself was very easy. Doing the inventory was actually harder. Initially, it made me very, very sad to actually start doing it and to do it. And then after I had started and had only done part of the house, I stopped. I had been doing it from memory when I was down in TX for Spring Break, and I reached a point where it was just getting too hard. Then I ran into the situation where the thought of doing it made me very blue. What this means is that I started doing it on Spring Break and it sort of took me 2 more weeks to get up the oooomph to finish it. But I did – finish it.

Just this week, we assigned values to things. That caused me lots of anxiety beforehand, partly because some of the stuff is hard to put a price-tag on. And we had to debate a little bit about which stuff we would skip in putting a price-tag on. But again, the actual discussion was simple; it just took a while (because of the price-tag issue).

I’m glad that my church is having a massive garage sale the weekend before I move. I can just dump my stuff off at the church, get a donation receipt, and let them deal with it. I’m NOT a garage sale kind of person. The stuff I am getting rid of is pretty much all clothes, and there was no way I was going to waste part of a weekend trying to sell my clothes that don’t fit anymore (I’ve lost weight! (more on that some other time)). I was just going to take it all to a local Goodwill, but I’d rather it start out at church. If they can’t sell it, it will end up at Goodwill anyway.

Do you even want to hear this? Probably not. But like I’ve said before, sometimes my blog is a bit like a diary for myself. Also, the process of writing it out can help me quit dwelling on it.

And now, I suppose I ought to either write my lecture for Monday or deal with more logistics. At this point, I’m not sure which will “win.” Probably the logistics. It is somewhat satisfying to check off something on my mental checklist. Again, it allows me to quit doing the “oh yeah, I’ve got to deal with that” on my drive to and from school.