When I moved from Illinois to Montreal, I did exactly that. The moving company came, packed up everything and stored it somewhere. Then, four months later, having spent the summer in several places, I finally had a place in Montreal and I called them and told them where to deliver. Which they did, although it took a couple weeks. They even took it through customs. It wasn’t cheap.
When I used PODS, the box fit easily within a parking space, and it sounds like the boxes from U-Haul (which fit on a trailer) could be similarly positioned.
I assume your apartment comes with at least one parking space. So the problem is where to put your car while loading your POD.
I heartily recommend getting an early start on packing. It will astound you how much stuff you have. From a 2-bedroom apartment I’d been in for 10 years (and I owned NO furniture when i moved in), I spent a week filing boxes and carrying them out to the POD.
From the PODS FAQ:
My parking space is less than 12 feet wide, even including the buffer space on either side, and also has wires running overhead at less than 15 feet.
Unfortunately, early packing is not an option. I have a serious professional exam on Sep 25th that I need to study intensely for, and then I will have 1 week before starting my next work assignment out of town.
Do the movers take a five-finger discount on your belongings?
You’re going to spend an extra $1000 or more to be able to retrieve an old egg beater and a couple sweaters. Not IMO a good tradeoff.
I was in the military for a few years. As such I and everyone I worked with moved far across the planet every 2-3 years. DoD would hire a local commercial mover to come in, pack, and ship everything to the new station. Whereat another commercial mover would bring it all out to your residence & drop it off.
One of the common tactics endorsed by the hard rule of collective experience was this: Do NOT unpack all the boxes when you get to the new station. Only break open a box and retrieve a particular needed item when you actually need it. After 3 years at your current station about 1/3 of the boxes will still be sealed, and another 1/3 will be half full. When it’s time to move again, just donate the whole pile of boxes to Goodwill. Don’t even untape the still-sealed boxes; just drop them off at Goodwill still taped shut. You don’t care what’s in there. You just know for sure you don’t need it; 3 years’ experience proved that.
A small exception can be made for transfers from cold climates to warm and then back. Odds are the boxes of parkas, mukluks, and touques you packed in North Dakota are still sealed up when your 3 years in Alabama are up. And they’ll be handy again for your next 2 years in northern Japan. But everything else still in a box goes to charity. Or nowadays, craigslist / freecycle.
This was considered smart decision making in an environment where the government was paying 100% of the cost of the move, and zero of our own dollars were on the line. It’s even smarter when you’re spending your own money to move and store stuff.
Good luck on your exam.
If you pass, maybe you’ll tell us what profession?
Ok - it was three quarters of a century ago, but after WW" my father elected to stay in the Rmy and go posted to Sierra Leone. A few months later we all followed him and all the furniture and stuff that my mother had was put into store at the army’s expense.
Roll forward ten years and the big day arrives when we have a nice house and the boxes can be unpacked. As a 12yo I remember how shabby and old fashioned it looked in out bright new house. Mother cried a lot and someone came with a truck and took nearly all of it away.
So yes. Unless you can seriously expect to be unpacking it within a year, get rid of everything that isn’t actually valuable.
Very practical advice, but neglects (a) possessions of purely sentimental value, and (b) stuff like tax documentation, where seven years is the expected reachback and failure to have that could cost big.
Until about 1980, the business was known as ‘Moving and Storage’. Mayflower was a biggie - fleets of trucks and huge warehouses.
These warehouses were where ‘unclaimed goods’ were auctioned if the owners stopped paying the storage fees.
I know we have a generation who don’t know to wind watches or dial a rotary phone, but have all the ‘Moving and Storage’ joints been replaced with U-Hauls and Self Storage?
p.s. - the old moving companies would bring in boxes and pack your stuff for you.
No, the ‘Moving and Storage’ joints have not all been replaced with U-Hauls and Self Storage. All of that still exists, if you want it. Most of those moving companies (Allied, United, Mayflower, etc.) are still around and will pack your stuff, store your stuff and move your stuff if you want and are willing to pay. I think a big difference is that today mass manufacturing has made much stuff so cheap to buy that much of it is not worth paying to pack, store or move.
Edited to add, there are a couple of differences. Today, many moving companies use reusable plastic bins instead of disposable cardboard boxes. And if your stuff is to be stored, they may just put it in a container (like PODS or the sort used in international commerce) and store it that way. That keeps your stuff separate from everyone else’s.
Allied, at least, still says “Moving and Storage” on the side of their trucks. It is, AFAIK, part of the name of the company. If I looked them up in the phone book, it would not be under “Allied” but under “Allied Moving And Storage”.
I have a follow-up question. I decided to have movers come and pack my stuff and keep it in their storage warehouse. But now I need to decide where to store my car. I want to store it indoors. It’s a BMW 3 series. How big of a storage space do I need? If you go to these self-storage companies’ websites, and pick “vehicle storage,” you get the outdoor parking lot option. And I’d rather get independent opinions first, than start calling these places and asking them, because they’ll probably try to upsell me. What’s the minimum storage unit size I can get away with, for just a car?
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Measure the car, including the width of the mirrors. you need a bigger storage space than that.
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Most storage “garages” aren’t really garages and will not let you put a car in there. The issue is the amount of gasoline & other flammables associated with a car.
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There are car movers that transport cars cross country on a truck. Call a local one of those and ask them about inside storage. They probably don’t do it themselves, but they know who does.
The self-storage places I’ve used all had a rule that you can’t store flammable liquids in the storage unit. So they won’t allow cars (gas in the tank).
Also, the only units I have seen which had a door a car would fit through were on TV: I’ve never seen one IRL.
I haven’t looked for years, but most major cities used to have parking garages that did monthly rentals. They are used to people parking a car they only need a few times a year.
I’d be worried about security, though. If the garage does self-serve parking too, somebody will notice a BMW that hasn’t moved in weeks, and then you’ll come back to find your badges, tires, and radio have gone missing.
And while the garage may have security cameras, … good luck finding the guy who stole your stuff three months ago, especially if they only keep video for 30 days (as a lot of camera systems do).
Assuming you find a place that will rent you a unit for your car:
Most single car garages are 12 by 20 feet. Most single car garage doors are 8 feet wide. In a pinch, you can go a lot smaller. I have seen places selling cargo containers converted for vehicle storage: the big change is an additional door on the side of the container so you can open the car door after driving it in.
A quick google search with the exact year of your car should find a site that will tell you its exact dimensions.
I took a blind stab: a 2010 325 4-door is 5’11.5" wide and 14’10.4" long, so it would theoretically fit in a box that was 6 by 15 feet, but you couldn’t get in or out of it in that box.
Long-term storage of a car is not simply a matter of parking it: tires will deteriorate if they never turn, and gasoline goes bad over time. There are ways to set a car up for storage (put it on stands to take the weight of the tires, replace the gas in the tank and lines with something more stable, etc). Properly stored, a car can sit for years. But I don’t know how long a car can sit without those precautions before things start going wrong.
I’ve had a great deal of luck starting cars that had sat for weeks or even months, but they were simple, cheap, and didn’t have fuel injection. With something like a BMW, I’d at least ask a mechanic if he thinks it would be okay to leave it parked for (X weeks) without starting it.
This may be a case where the best bet is to leave it with a friend or relative: somebody you trust who can look at it every day and start it once a week.
My car will most likely need to be in storage for 4 months. It’s close to the point of needing new tires anyway, so I will probably just get new ones upon taking it out of storage. I’ll add some fuel stabilizer to the gas tank. But I don’t have any friends or relatives who have space to store it on their property.