… from Brooklyn back to Detroit, with one small room of belongings (largest single item is a chest of drawers) and as inexpensively as possible.
Any helpful suggestions?
You can ship stuff pretty cheap on the Greyhound. Check what the weight limit is though! Pack it well and pick it up, at your convenience (take a cab if it’s a few boxes!)
This works well if you can’t quite get everything in the car, etc.
Can you really use Greyhound to ship furniture (chest of drawers)?
It’d have to be pretty small (and light):
“The maximum weight per package is 100 pounds. The maximum dimensions that we can accommodate are 29” H x 47" W x 82" L."
How old is your nephew and what kind of budget are we working with?
Nephew is 35. Budget is “small as possible.”
How valuable is the chest of drawers? … as-cheap-as-possible means leaving stuff behind and replacing the items … when I moved from Portland, OR to San Diego, CA, I loaded up my backpack and hitchhiked … didn’t cost me anything …
Does he already own a car?
How attached is he to this chest of drawers? If it’s just a utilitarian piece, I’m thinking it might be cheaper and easier to just buy one in Detroit.
Living out in the vast expanses of the Wild West as I do, I confess up-front that I don’t have a clear picture of the distances involved in moving from Brooklyn to Detroit. But here is a little trick I’ve used several times while making moves that entailed multi-hour drives each way:
I’ve made it a point in life to accumulate ONLY such possessions as can be fit in my car (well, almost anyway). I don’t even have a bed – just a foam pad on the floor that I can roll up. Works for me.
When I’ve moved, I do it ALL (or nearly so) by loading stuff in my car and driving, taking up to five round-trips to move everything.
Anyway, here’s my little trick: For the longer moves, I rent a self-storage spot about halfway, and move most of my stuff there, holding out only the items that I think I immediately need to have around. For the final load of stuff, I load up all those items and drive them all the way to my new digs, and consider myself moved in there. Then, at my leisure, I make multiple trips from my new digs to the storage place to move all the rest of my stuff.
I’ve done this twice in the last 15 years, and it’s worked out very nicely for me.
I’m very fond of this nephew (who does not have a driver’s license) despite what (in my opinion) is a ridiculous attachment to this item of furniture. For the sake of discussion let’s call it “irreplaceable.”
UPS will ship it … but they’ll charge extra for oversized items … see “Weight and Size” page from their web-site … to find the least expensive will require shopping around …
Alternatively, maybe a no-holds-barred all-out emotional blackmail campaign against his uncle … “If you loved me you’d haul my crap out to Detroit for me” …
Your best bet might be an actual moving company. They will combine multiple households of goods on one truck, with a barrier separating the loads. If you can put the dresser and other goods on a pallet (and then shrink-wrap everything), a trucking company might handle it cheaply. You might need to specify that they come with a truck with a liftgate and a pallet jack.
Borrow or rent a regular truck…drive it yourself they drive home in the same truck