Moving Storage Methods

04/14/10

During the process of moving, storage is a helpful resource. Storage is usually a component in the process, regardless if you pay for someone else to move you or do the whole thing yourself. I have moved a lot, so have had varying degrees of experience with the whole moving storage adventure. My moves have been everything from chaotic and inexpensive, to organized and very expensive. I feel like there are more ways to meet your moving storage needs than there were when I was a neophyte. Perhaps all those moves made me open my eyes to some easier ways to get it done.

In my 20s, I did moving the cheap way. That involved friends, family and some borrowed vehicles. I usually had to stash items at a storage unit somewhere in between moves, or because my new place was too small. I then progressed to renting one of those Uhaul trucks. That still required buying lots of beer and pizza for the people I would convince to help me. Surprisingly, the most daunting piece of that method was getting up enough courage to drive the truck from point A to point B. I cannot believe they let just anyone drive those things. Those rental trucks should be armed with loud beeping noises and flashing lights to warn people around them.

Once I was done with grad school and making money, I could hire a moving company. Talk about luxurious. The movers packed up everything, loaded it in the truck, drove the truck and unloaded everything. All I did was buy them some pizza (you see a trend with moving and pizza.) The problem with having the movers do everything, is that they were like a tornado. They packed up my garbage can with trash still in it and wrapped up little things like mail they found on the counter. It was fast and way too thorough. Everything was put in a storage facility until the new house was ready. We did not know what was where, since they packed everything.

We are about to test our moving storage chutzpa again. We will be moving to another part of the country. Our needs are more complicated, as we now have kids and real furniture. We are way beyond the renting a truck and bribing friends method. Additionally, we want to have more control that we did during our last move. We plan to combine the different options available. We will do a fair amount of packing for the things we care about most. We rented a moving storage box to put some of the things we do not need until the rest of the house is finished. The moving storage company will drop it off, we pack it at our leisure, and they pick it up and move it to a storage warehouse in our new city. We will hire a moving crew to load the rest of the stuff and get it to our new house. Once the rest of the new house is finished, the moving storage guys will deliver the storage unit and we will unpack it. We are not looking forward to, yet another, move. At least we are now experienced movers and can come up with a moving storage plan that suits our needs.