Dale’s jobs wouldn’t end, the packing wouldn’t end, the struggling to leave town wouldn’t end, the drive wouldn’t end, the rain wouldn’t end, the unpacking wouldn’t end, and the making a home out of the warehouse of boxes filling every square foot shows no signs of ending.
Spoiler Alert: it all ends well.
OK, it has been a while since we started driving, but this was no blog by the pool in the afternoon kind of road trip. Of the 6 days (and almost all nights long) on the road driving from California to New Jersey, 2,982 miles, we only got a hotel room two nights, and those nights we got little more sleep than the nights/early mornings that we napped a bit in the truck.
Moving Tip # 47: start packing early.
This includes your general maintenance of getting rid of stuff accumulating over 30 years in the same place. Throw stuff out once in a while. Sure I like to keep my options for possibly needing that obscure item I have not touched in years, just in case, but this approach will bite you in the butt come move time.
Moving Tip #48: get a bigger truck.
Estimate your needs, use truck calculators from various rental truck websites, and realistically gauge the space your stuff will fill. Then get the next bigger truck. Trust me on this.
Once I realized and accepted what Dale said all along that the truck was not big enough, it was way too late in the project to change trucks. As we ran out of space, Dale came up with the solution of racking all the bikes on the Prius. Originally, I thought that there would be all kinds of room for five bikes in the truck. Not even close.
I originally thought that I could put plastic bags on the bike seats to keep them dry in case we ran into a little rain. I threw that idea out shortly after putting the Prius on the trailer. The bikes would not slip-stream the truck as I hoped and I pulled the bags rather than litter them as soon as we started.
As we ran out of time and space, we quit trying to sort and organize belongings into neatly labeled boxes and just started stuffing garbage bags and stuffing them into the truck: a more malleable space utilization option at the end of packing.
Moving Tip # 87: label boxes thoughtfully.
If you just write “Kitchen” on 15 boxes thinking that you will see what they contain when you open them, this precludes having an idea of the contents BEFORE opening all 15 boxes.
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