Well, we’ve moved out completely and closed on the selling of our house.
The trailer was packed to 23’9″, or 9″ over the 23 linear feet estimate. In the process of having our trailer dropped off and picked up, we discovered that the subcontractor for U-Pack (an ABF subsidiary) for our move was Old Dominion Household Services, which offers consumers moves direct to consumers themselves. I ran the estimates on OD Household Services and discovered that the move would have been 40% cheaper by going directly to OD. While I shopped around, I didn’t go deep enough into my search.
We’re currently living out of suitcases and bins with family, and preparing to fly out of the country for a few weeks. Our dogs are staying with other family in town and have settled in to a mostly lazy routine themselves after a rough couple of hours and lots of nervousness about the old house being emptied.
There’s nothing much left to do with moving but go to our new location and find a rental house. Our stuff is already on its way, and we’ll catch up with it in less than a month.
One of the biggest challenges with not working a fixed schedule in a physical office is that, occasionally, it’s hard to keep track of time (whether you’re working too much or too little.) My work arrangement for now will mostly revolve around a typical “9 to 5” Eastern Time Zone work day, but we also have most of the flexibility of a “ROWE” environment.
I firmly believe in the intent behind the ROWE concept introduced by Why Work Sucks and How to Fix It (Amazon affiliate link). I believe that many problems with work start when you don’t really know what meeting your objectives looks like, provided that everyone is mature enough to accept that they have work to get done. However, it’s sometimes hard to gauge your focus and how you’re spending your time without the crutch of office hours and a physical space.
I’ve found that the amount of time I spend distracting myself from work and/or taking breaks from is closely related to any lack of direction that I might feel, and becomes a canary in the coal mine to call my attention to the need to make adjustments or seek better direction.
RescueTime is one application that is helpful in tracking activities and time. I’ve tuned my account to track certain websites as distracting or very distracting and coding, project applications, and software development reference sites as very productive.
I end up using the productivity score as a percentage and multiplying it by the number of hours worked that week. From there, I can gauge my effort level from week-to-week.
Yearly trends (free version)
I can also compare the productivity score itself from week to week and look for trends and slumps in my productivity.
WakaTime statistics
Another handy site that I’ve found that is geared more toward programmers is WakaTime. There are plugins for several popular editors, and the plugins track how much time you’ve spent on projects. (Maybe you were coding, but you fell down a rabbit hole on a project you weren’t even supposed to be working on?)
I currently use the free versions of both of these tools, and those versions generally provide me with enough details to give myself an audit of what I’ve been working on and make adjustments to work or environment if things are falling apart.
The paid versions of both services give you more historical information and RescueTime gives a few more options with the paid version. (WakaTime only does 7 days for free.)
I don’t share my productivity numbers with anyone else in the context of a performance review, and I wouldn’t recommend anyone else use these tools as evidence for themselves or for or against others. I use them as one measurement of how I’m getting work done. In this limited and private context, these tools are invaluable to me.
6 hours of professional movers later, the trailer is packed to about 23′ or so. I ended up doing some slight adjustments at the end to get a few stragglers in the trailer.
In the process, we’ve ditched a worn out sectional, a broken recliner, and a crappy computer cabinet. The added cost of hauling those things along was more than their replacement cost, at $120/ft of trailer space.
4 Hours In, Plenty of Trailer LeftWell, there was a communication breakdown with the movers, and we somehow ended up having to get squeezed in for a “last appointment of the day”, it seems.
The movers spent about six hours at our house today, partially interrupted/slowed down by the severe thunderstorms that came through about the time the movers arrived.
The packing has been incredibly efficient in terms of space, making use of virtually every cubic foot of the 9′ of linear feet that was loaded after 4 hours.
We’re probably going to go a few hours over the time I budgeted, but it looks like we’ll have a good shot at loading in the 23 linear feet that I had quoted.
The movers have to return tomorrow for a few big pieces, but otherwise, the trailer is pretty well loaded, with most of the belongings packed into 15 linear feet.
This whole thing appears to be one giant game of Tetris to me.
At some point, we’ve had three simultaneous reservations for “pack it yourself” moving and storage services:
PODS
UHaul UBoxes
U-Pack
PODS for 2 16’x8’x8′ units was going to be about as much as filling the U-Pack trailer (27’x8’x9′). PODS offers slightly more cubic footage for that arrangement, and about 18% more square footage for a full trailer. There were two upsides for U-Pack: monthly storage was about 10% additional per month whereas PODS was about 20% additional per month.
The UHaul UBoxes were 8’x5’x8′, but the internal dimensions were slightly smaller than that. The cost was similar to the other two for the initial move, but the upside was that 30 days of storage/rental were included. (Monthly storage was in between the other two services.) One problem that I thought of with the smaller units is that a lot of space could be wasted by having 1-foot gaps due to not being able to fill the space.
Flexibility
If I recall correctly, PODS needs several days notice for pickup and drop-off, and their truck needs an easy space to get in and out of. One of the PODS would likely have had to been outside our gates (which probably would have blocked the street).
UHaul only gave Thursday and Saturday drop-off options for its boxes, which we could probably have worked around. However, limited availability for drop-off could also mean spilling over into an extra month rental just because convenience didn’t allow drop-off to happen sooner.
U-Pack uses a 28-foot trailer that otherwise has no special requirements and uses the same drivers as any other tractor-trailer, as far as I can tell. They contract out to trucking companies for transport, and our trailer was provided by Old Dominion. While the trailer looks unwieldy, the driver was able to maneuver the trailer into our backyard without much effort, unlike the massive PODS we’ve used before seem to require.
TBD
What we don’t know yet is how much space we’ll actually require, but U-Pack is beneficial here, too, because if we’re able to tightly pack our belongings, then we’re not charged for the unused space at the back of the trailer. We’ll see where we are when loaded.
Since this is the last weekend before the movers help load the moving trailer, virtually everything is packed away now:
All the dishes except for the ones that happened to be in the dishwasher at the time.
The toaster oven, coffee makers, pots and pans.
Any dry foods that required cooking or additional ingredients have been handed off to the sister in law.
Soy sauce, fish sauce, and other non-refrigerated condiments and spices have also been handed off to the sister-in-law.
About a week or so of clothes is packed for the Philippines trip which will happen the day after we close.
I’ve packed 5 days of running outfits in my gym bag and will hold out 2 pair of running shoes as well.
The “lawn mowing shoes” have been packed up. Oops. I have a backup pair of shoes that can be “converted”, though.
Observations so far:
The shorter the time frame you have to work with, the less painful things become.
Keep track of things that you’ll need close to or after the date in which your stuff gets packed up or transported away.
Even if you eat out quite a bit, the amount spent getting carryout for dinner versus having to cover every meal without pots/pans/toaster oven is another level of expense altogether, unless you really like PB&J and cheese sandwiches.
Starbucks VIA still has that “instant coffee” taste. I’m sticking to the french press as long as possible. Or buying coffee.
I’m stashing an extra couple thousand dollars in a hidden “moving across the country” account on the off chance we do this again.
Still to do this weekend:
Consolidate the technological devices in the house and pack any extra switches.
Break down the beds so that they’re just mattresses on the floor and the rails and hardware are wrapped up for quick loading.
The problem with moving a home office, especially over a long distance, is that at some point, an uncomfortable portion of your office will need to be packed away. While I don’t have to have a lot to do my job beyond my company-supplied 15″ Retina MacBook Pro, I had purchased a Seiki 4K display and was using it as my main code editing screen. Once even the moving boxes we packed up, how was I supposed to work? At some point, I’d need to be able to work without carrying around 3 screens (I’ll admit that I plugged in the third screen just because it was there.)
Fortunately, a coworker had recently pointed me toward Display Menu, which brings back a screen resolution menu for the recent versions of OS X. With that, I was able to crank up the screen resolution to the native Retina resolution of 2880×1800. While I initially did this in the interest of just trying to see how much screen real estate I could squeeze in, it had the added bonus of being able to display almost as much information as the 4K display (ok, about 66% as much, but the 4K display is a monster.)
So, in anticipation of not having my three monitor setup, I’ve been adjusting to working from the Retina display alone. With the higher resolution, that’s very manageable, and it has the added bonus of being able to work in a coffee shop or out on a deck without being an ass or hauling a car load of equipment out. I also have been working from the island in the kitchen, which won’t be packed up for the move. The smaller arrangement takes a little bit of mental adjustment, but it works perfectly fine for programming.
There are still a couple of accessories for the MacBook Pro that I keep in use with the reduced setup: a Magic Trackpad and a Matias Laptop Pro keyboard. Somehow, these accessories make the workspace feel more like a desktop. It’s probably because moving workspaces involves an armful of equipment and more than one trip, just like a full desktop spread would.
We’ve been looking at Zillow, Trulia rentals, Realtor.com, and Apartments.com apps for the last couple of months. It seems like the info on many of the meta real estate sites is likely to be out of date.
Big Horse Seymour
Our biggest problem:
Seymour is about 75 pounds. He’s not a “dangerous” dog by any reasonable definition, but he’s definitely *not* a small dog. Most of the rentals we’ve looked at the “accept” dogs have a limit of 20 lbs. I’m pretty sure I’ve never had an adult dog that was under that limit.
One slightly more fruitful way to independent searching for houses for rent was to take note of the property management company renting a house that came close and then checking their site. Still, we had maybe one house that didn’t explicitly rule us out.
Frustrated, I finally got desperate and found the Facebook page of a local dog rescue and asked for suggestions. Dog rescue people are amazing resources for helping you figure out how to find places that will allow your fur beasts.
Facebook Response to my post
As you can see, I even found someone with a house for rent in the area. I reached out to the realtor in the responses and not only found out about several places available that would take our boys on, but several in the school district that we were targeting, and 2 well under our budget.
Maybe I jumped the gun a bit on looking, but it was pretty frustrating trying to locate a place, and I was losing confidence that we’d find a place within a reasonable amount of time.
I’ll post an update once we get down there on perception vs. reality, but finding a place for our pets is looking way more promising than it did a few weeks ago.
I had easily shrugged off the chaos that moving was going to bring. After all, we were only going to list our house. It might not even sell. We’d just have to put up with periodic showings and figuring out what to do with the dogs during that time. There was no real risk of this actually happening.
And then we got an offer on the house and everything started falling into place. And we figured out how much this move was going to cost. There wasn’t going to be some house sell windfall fairy that was going to pay for all of this. It was going to be tight.
And then, all of sudden, we started packing up boxes of things that we had used in recent memory. Not daily stuff, but still enough that occasionally there was the, “Oh, right… that’s packed away.”
We’ve called three portable storage companies for moving costs. I even checked on full service moving (too expensive, but maybe 15% more than movers + storage and transport.)
And I have a large treadmill. And two occasionally rowdy medium-large dogs.
Oh yeah, and we’re going to the Philippines in between selling the house and moving in to the new house.
