Educating the Wheelers

We are essentially packing and moving in two stages this time. First we’re getting all of the clutter and anything we can spare out of the house before it goes on the market [and anything you can’t see, like stuff in drawers]. Then after it sells, we’ll pull out the furniture and the bare bones we left in to live on. Because of the two stage process, we decided to try the PODS approach.

So, right now there’s a POD in the driveway and we’re filling it up with junk. They are going to come take it away the day before we go on the market where it’ll sit in storage. Then once we sell, we’ll get another POD [and possibly bring back the first, if it’s not full. But I think it will be.] Then we will have them transfer those two PODS to MN, where they will sit for about another month while we stay with my parents and buy a house up there.

It seemed like a more straightforward way to go than dealing with loading trucks, bringing to a storage facility, moving stuff from a facility back to a truck, then heading to MN, then putting in a facility, then reloading a truck and bringing it to our new home.

We don’t have the final numbers yet — it’s going to depend on how many PODS/of what size we end up filling — but it didn’t seem to be outrageously more than going the moving truck route, particularly for our situation. Both are plenty expensive for my taste.

When we moved from CA to TX, we had a good experience with Movex, but they use independent contractors to do the actual move, so we may have just gotten the luck of the draw. [Our drivers were a young married couple who were totally cool, and very helpful.]

So far, our PODS experience has been good. But there’s still plenty of time for it to go all to heck.