Moving Day

Moving day is a wonderful day, when all the neighbors come out to help, and everything goes your way.  Well, I don’t believe that, but I did not anticipate that my move into my home would be worse than the move I had two years ago when I moved 1500 miles for a relocation. 

The house that I bought was only about 3 miles from my apartment, but I decided that I would rent a truck so I could get everything moved in one load.  I had several friends from my church volunteer to help out;  we had set everything up to start around 9 am Saturday morning.

The night before our move, U-haul called to tell me they had two trucks get in a wreck and I could not get the truck I had reserved.  They put me on the reservation list and ended up calling back later that evening and offered me a truck at 6 pm that was quite a distance away.  I asked them about granting me the extra miles to go get the truck since they couldn’t get me a close one.  They would not grant any free miles.  Due to the distance required to get the truck, their refusal to comp me the miles and the fact that I would have to reschedule all of my help – I decided to pursue other alternatives.

 I reserved a truck with Budget.  I thought things went pretty smooth with this reservation, their prices were higher, but they had a truck.  In the morning I went to pick up the truck and discovered that their reservation hot-line had reserved a truck for me at a location that does not rent trucks, only cars.  It turns out the nearest Budget location that did rent trucks was double booked.  At this point I began driving around and checked out other rental locations I was aware of – nothing was available.

By this time people were showing up at my apartment and had begun moving stuff in a pickup truck.  I borrowed a second pickup and returned home to help.  We eventually had three pickups and a van.  Thank heaven for family and church friends.

Things were proceeding slowly but well.  As we were finishing loading the trucks for the third trip we noticed an approaching storm.  The rain started falling as we were leaving, continued throughout the entire drive and while unloading the furniture at my new home.  Everything was soaked.  We shoved everything into the garage since it was too wet to take inside.

Obviously my next task was to begin drying out everything we had just moved into the garage, so we broke out the refreshments and thanked everyone for their assistance – we were done moving for the day.  We had gotten probably 90 percent of everything moved;  all the large items were moved and many of them were now sitting in the garage wet.  I would move the remaining items later during the week as time permitted.

Some valuable lessons that I learned during this move were:

• Truck rental rates are lower Monday through Thursday, trucks are easier to come by those days since most people move on weekends.  
• Pick your moving day well, some weekends are big moving weekends such as the weekends before college starts and the weekend after college lets out.
• Some moving companies will not concede on miles or fees when they cause problems
• Some moving companies will charge you a fee to put you on a waiting list when they are heavily booked, they will guarantee you get a truck, but it may be at a time and place not to your liking.

To this day one of my good friends gets an uneasy feeling whenever the thought arises of me organising a move or working with a moving company.