No matter how organized you are, there will be things you need to put your hands on that you can’t find. (I have a box that I kept separate that has all my essentials – screwdriver, box cutter, tape measure, packing tape, scissors, jumbo sharpie marker, etc. etc. but when I need some regular Scotch tape, do you think I could find it?)
No matter how much you measure and visualize, not everything will fit as expected when you get it into your new house.
I’ve written about how we’re trying to keep the process stress-free for us but I’m also trying to keep it stress-free for the contractors we’re using. It was very nice to hear one of our movers at the end of the day talk about how much he enjoyed working with us when a lot of their day-to-day work is people (admittedly who are in a stressful situation) micromanaging and criticizing everything they do. How much fun did they have? At one point, one worker felt comfortable enough to say “I’m not going to lie – I tried out your massage chair before we carried it up” and, instead of giving him shit, I said “Good, then you’ll know how it should work when you put it back together on the other end!” Or how they loaded our bikes by riding them up the ramp instead of walking them. Or how they tried the kid’s slide that our new house has attached to our deck. Or how they cracked up when I said “The next time you guys move me, it’ll be straight into a nursing home and I ain’t taking any of this heavy shit with me!”
There are a lot of hidden costs in moving you might not think of – from moving supplies adding up to more than you budget to all sorts of fees and charges from everyone you work with to realising all the things you thought you had but need to buy for your new house to the cost of buying your movers lunch.
On the flip side, you can save lots of money in various ways as well – we got the majority of boxes we used for free from the liquor store and grocery store instead of buying new (or used) moving boxes, we lucked into a bedroom set that was marked down $700 the week *before* Black Friday when it went back up to the original price – hmmm?), I’m not averse to buying stuff from discount racks anywhere I go – Canadian Tire, Leons Furniture – or from resell sites like Kijiji and Facebook Marketplace.
One of the toughest parts of moving is once you get everything into your new house but then you realise it’s still going to take weeks (months?) to get it all unpacked and organized. <sigh>
No matter how many trips you make to your empty old house, you’ll still keep finding things you’ve forgotten to pack – decorations stuck on windows, a security cam hidden out of sight, a toilet brush that you should probably replace anyhow (should’ve listed it as an “inclusion” on our house listing! 😉
Moving about six blocks from your old house to your new house is awesome – while the movers were loading up on big furniture and household items, I loaded our van and made about three or four runs to our house to unload smaller stuff. (Also, from a cost saving point of view, we paid the movers to actually move stuff instead of having to pay them to sit on a truck which would’ve been the case if they had to make three trips across Regina and back and could’ve added hours to our day.)
Yes, we did have three moving truck loads of stuff to move even after filling a dumpster *then* loading a Big Steel Box container ourselves! To be fair, since we moved all the boxes ourselves, the remaining furniture didn’t fit into the truck neatly (I spent a lot of time thinking about how much I played Tetris as a kid during this move and how people always say video games aren’t providing life skills!) which is part of the reason they had to do three trips instead of two.
It’s a toss-up on whether buying the new house or selling the old house is more stressful but hopefully we’ll have an update on that sooner rather than later! 🙂
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