Moving Archives - Working Remotely

Challenges of a New Place AND Being Remote

Slow Job Search

It’s been interesting trying to replace my wife’s job down here in Pensacola. Things seem to just move more slowly that back in Louisville. Maybe it’s a Southern thing? It seems like turnaround for a job application is 4+ weeks, and that that isn’t a surprise to anyone.

I’ve also been looking for a replacement for my Catholic Music Ministry, which has been a similar challenge compared to Louisville… Even the Catholic churches in Louisville that are on the verge of closing have bigger congregations than some here that are moderately healthy.

Prices of Things

Florida does their licensing and car registration differently. Driver’s licenses are for 10 years (at least at over 21 ages.) For car registration they get all money up front for the license plate, apparently. This means the driver’s license was about 2 times as much as expected and the car registration was about 2.5x the cost of our property tax renewal for my new car. My understanding is that the long run cost of registration is significantly cheaper, though.

We’re also missing ALDI, which made the weekly grocery bill significantly cheaper than it is currently, at least for common stuff like bread/cheese/eggs… No hope on the horizon of an ALDI showing up in the city anytime soon.

Being Remote

There are actual days in which I don’t actually run into people that don’t live in my house. I’d love to be able to walk (or quickly drive) down the street to be around other people. but the rental house that was available in the school district that we wanted to be in is 4 miles from any place of business. I’ve gone out for a couple of meetups and tried to connect with the local church, but it’s been pretty hard being an introvert and just randomly making friends.

Moved In

The day started off well, with the trailer finally arrived at the new house.

The initial survey of things was that a few pieces of our belongings were banged up a bit from being packed in there, but for the most part the damage was cosmetic.

Once the movers started at about noon, we started realizing how much stuff we had, and we had gotten rid of belongings (including a sectional) in a house only about 300 ft in space larger than our current house. We *did* have a 2 1/2 car garage, but we used that for our cars vs this house’s 2 car garage that current is full of boxes and things.

It took about 3 hours and 45 minutes to unload the 26 linear feet of trailer space, about half as much time as it took to load it.

One thing that I wish we had done better? Tracked smaller parts such as bookshelf parts and inserts in bags in a large plastic bag and wrapped with plastic to the item or in a sealed shut drawer associated with the item (such as a TV). We’re missing a few parts, including one remote, because it wasn’t securely packed with the item itself or a piece of furniture associated with it.

We’re also missing a chair back to a recliner, which makes the purchase of a replacement couch a bit more urgent.

Damaged piano. That bottom piece should be near the bottom.

However, the biggest disappointment of the day was the my electronic piano took a major beating, after being packed resting on its pedal board that was never meant to bear the weight of the entire instrument, much less any heavy objects packed on top of it. The good news is that the pedals still connect to the rest of the console (electronically) and that the main console functions either way. The body is also actual wood due to my interest spending the extra [too much money] at the time to upgrade from “rosewood finish” plastic. I’m hoping this means that the board can be repaired/reinforced enough to be completely functional. I was pondering a replacement keyboard instrument, but wasn’t planning on replacing it so soon.

Moving Out Complete

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.

Moving Day 2

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.

Moving Day 1

Well, 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.

Our U-Pack Trailer is Here!

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.

5 Days Until the Moving Trailer is 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.

Finding Rental Property that Accepts Dogs

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.

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.

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.

It begins

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.

WHAT WERE WE THINKING?