Moving to Your Homestead: Moving Companies and Packing

U-Pack trailer not NEAR big enough for a family of nine.

First week and already having issues. Well, routine move-to-a-new-state issues I suppose. We are still waiting for one of our two moving trailers to arrive. We've been in our house ten days and luckily packed suitcases as if we were going on vacation. Thanks to that forethought, we have had clothes to wear and minimum daily living supplies.

Preparing For The Move (Tips)

Tip #1 Pack as if you are going on a vacation. If you aren't driving your things up in a uHaul yourself, plan on the moving company taking at least a week to get your things to your new house. Be mindful of work clothes, church clothes, play clothes and lay-around-the-house clothes. Pack your toiletries and enough snacks to tide you over for a few days at least (until you can get to a grocery store.)

We also towed my 8x10 enclosed trailer up behind one of our vehicles. Even though 60% of it is consumed with my portable workshop, the rest of it was used to haul four mattresses with us. Thanks to this, we don't have to sleep directly on the floor (but the kids are rotating.) We packed a modest supply of cooking supplies like pots, pans, and plastic forks/knives/spoons/cups. We also brought paper plates and bowls with paper towels and toilet paper.

I also packed one of our WonderWash machines for laundry and have already put it to use. The house we bought has no washer and after a week, our dirty laundry was piling up. After a few spins in the WonderWash, we opted for a quick run to the laundry mat.  Utilize any left over space for packing more supplies. We hauled a car on a tow dolly and packed that car to the hilt with boxes.

Tip #2 Research your moving companies. Atlas was a company that would do EVERYTHING for us: box it all up, load it on a truck, drive it to our destination and unload the boxes into the house.

Cost $12,000

U-Pack is a company that estimates the size of trailer you will need based on the number of people in your family and the size of your home (that you are leaving) by number of bedrooms and bathrooms. They drop the empty trailer off at your house and give you three days to pack it. Then they pick it up, deliver it to your new home and you have three days to unload it.

Cost $4500

Uhaul is a company everyone knows. You rent the truck, fill it up and drive it yourself. I did not investigate this option but hindsight has taught me that this might have been a better option. It would have been much cheaper and I could have driven the stuff straight to my house in one day...instead of it taking ten.

Cost: not sure but cheaper than U-Pack

My opinion: Although we chose U-Pack, we are very disappointed for several reasons. Two big reasons are that they have been horrible on staying on time and they grossly underestimated the size of trailer we needed. They were supposed to drop the trailer off between 8am and noon on a Wednesday. Instead they dropped it off at about 830pm on Wednesday costing us an entire day of loading.  You may thing one day isn't much but if you factor in all the stress that goes with moving your entire family, this is one more stress factor that you don't need. Then they were several days late picking it up, causing the delay in delivering it to our new home. To add insult to injury, their driver (Old Dominion) called me on a Saturday (yesterday) and said that if I would pay their driver an extra $50, he would deliver my stuff the same day. Otherwise it would have to wait until Monday. A formal complaint has been lodged regarding extortion. We ended up needing TWO trailers instead of one so I'm sure our cost will double although I have not received a response back yet as to if there will be any compensation for our troubles.

 The saga continues...

~OJD