Moving Day! Share your stories

Miscellaneous and Personal Stuff I Must Share
41

I helped a friend of mine’s daughter move her stuff from Seattle to LA. She was going to hire movers at about $4,000 or so, and I told her to just get a Rental truck. Told her I could get the stuff to LA in two days. She rented a 17 Ft long Box truck and she Filled it up with about 1,300 Cu Ft of stuff.

No problem with the move, but as I sat in her new place watching people move boxes in, I suggested she draw a chalk outline of a body on the floor and cover it with a throw rug. Then drill a couple of 1/2 inch holes in the wall behind a picture.
Tell visitors that you got the place cheap because the landlord had trouble renting the place after the CSI people finally took the tape down. Tell the visitors you had to put the rug there because you couldn’t get the chalk marks off the floor.

See if they try to peek under the rug. Then tell them you had to hang the picture where it is to hide the bullet holes. See if they peek behind the picture. Then come up with a story about the killing.

I’m prepping her mom to see if we can get her to faint when she sees the bullet holes. If she does, she’ll pbobably come after me when she comes to.

The real test of your talent is to see how long you can spin out a completely rediculous story

42

I once conducted a 5-point move. I lived in a 1-bdrm apartment, and built a new house about 50 miles away. Took 6 months to build the 3-bdrm house, so I had lots of time to think about what would go where. My mother around this time ALSO moved (downsizing) and offered some of her furniture to me, when I finished building the new house. So I rented a storage unit nearby my apartment and filled it up with Mom’s castoffs.

Then, Mom actually DID her move and discovered that she couldn’t make room for her (my) piano, so she rented another storage unit for it near where she lived. (About 50 miles in the opposite direction from my apartment.)

Moving day drew near, and another friend offered up two beautiful heavy hardwood furniture items IF I would come and fetch them. (About an hour’s drive north)

So I hired two guys with a moving van and laid out their plan for them. They spent 18 straight hours driving here, driving there, moving this, unloading that, pickup here, dropoff there. It was a circus.

I paid them a fortune, and tipped them well besides. A few months later I had a small moving job to offer them. (I’d found an entertainment center at a garage sale that I wanted them to move for me.) They wouldn’t answer the phone. :slight_smile:

43

When my wife and i first moved in together (before we got married), we were both grad students in Baltimore. I had built up a fair bit of moving karma by helping quite a few other people move, so we had about 14 people help us move from our two separate one-bedroom apartments into a three-bedroom house. Despite the fact that she had LOTS of stuff, and lived in a third-floor walk-up, it went pretty smoothly.

When we moved out here to the west coast, we had a 6-week gap between leaving Baltimore and arriving in San Diego, so we used Door To Door, and had them store the shipping containers until we were ready for them.

Our place in San Diego is a two-story apartment, and the bottom floor of the apartment is one level above the street. This means that there are 23 steps to get up to our front door, and then another 15 steps inside to get to the top floor. We initially thought that we’d save some money by just doing it ourselves, and would take it slowly, but a few trips up those 23 steps with heavy boxes and large pieces of furniture convinced us that we’d die of a heart attack before we finished.

We decided to drive around to a local hardware store and get a couple of day laborers from the parking lot. When we arrived there, it was about noon, and i think many of the guys there had given up finding any work that day. I found a couple of guys, told them what needed doing, and offered them $60 each for what i expected would be 2-3 hours of work. They accepted, and with the four of us all working together, we were done in two hours. We then bought lunch and drinks and sat down to relax, communicating in our mediocre Spanish and their mediocre English. They worked like trojans, and without them we would have been fucked, i think.

44

I have moved a lot and really despise it. Some moves went smoother then others but there was one that was just awful and it was all my fault…

I was moving out of an ex fiancés, I broke off the engagement and really wanted out so I moved out on a day he was working. It was just me and my two kids who were like 9 and 13. I picked up the biggest UHaul they had and it was a bit scary driving it. It took me an hour to back it up the driveway. Then we start loading it and we did a good job. The washer and dryer were the toughest. The kids could have been a little more gentle with the stuff. We get to the apartment a few hours later and the kids were not into unloading it. I can’t blame them for being bored. I pull down the ramp in the back and hear a big crash and glass breaking. My daughter decided to open the side door and all my china and glass figurines fell out onto the sidewalk and broke. I was heart broken. Then I hear my son crying out in pain and run to the back of the truck and he has fallen off the ramp he was doing stunt jumps off of on his bike. He bent the frame of his bike and was grabbing his crotch screaming. Luckily he was ok. It took till 10 pm to get everything off the truck. What a Nightmare.

45

Way to go!

I’ve moved (twice) in heavy snow. Not fun, I tell you. I’d bet rain would be even worse. (Unless you can back the truck up to the door or garage or something.)

46

I’ve moved around tons, and tend to just leave stuff behind rather than drag it around.

All that comes to mind at the moment is…

…leaving college for the summer, with my roommate’s small car PACKED to the top with her stuff.
Couldn’t see out the back, the back seat was stuffed to the top.
We had a cow skull strapped to the top of the car cause it wouldn’t fit inside.
Her brother…nearly 6 feet tall at that point…was crammed into the front passenger bucket seat with me.
And I held a giant plant, with it’s top sticking out the window, cause it wouldn’t fit anywhere else either.

So we’re flying down the highway, gravid as an elephant 14 months along, the car bristling like a porcupine with everything sticking out of it, can’t move at all in the front cause I’m sitting on her brother and the plant is sticking out all over…

…and her brother starts SCREAMING.

Apparantly, there was a spider in the plant, and it was crawling around…

So now there’s two of us screaming, and my poor roommate is trying to find a spot so we can leap out of the car and smack the spiders off each other.

20 years later and I’m still laughing at the image. :stuck_out_tongue:

47

Ugh, I moved a year ago and it was miserable.

My go-to helpers (parents and brother) fell through. My dad begged off since it was tax season. He offered to hire some dedicated movers, on the reasoning that he would earn more working the day and hiring them than he would lose by spending two days driving, helping me move, and driving back. I understood, but like a fool I declined the offer of movers. I can’t remember why my brother couldn’t show up, but I don’t have any angry memories so it must have been a decent reason.

Like a fool - I reasoned, “I don’t have that much stuff. I’ll just rent a utility van instead of a U-Haul”

I didn’t have any backups. Most of my friends already had plans for the weekend. Only one (and God bless him, he was a saint about it) was able to answer my frantic call for the weekend (I called him on Thursday night).

On top of all of that, I had put shit off for too long. My apartment at the time was not only not packed up, but filthy. I also badly needed my security deposit back for cash (about $1500).

So that week was hell. Frantic packing and cleaning. Then moving weekend comes and it turns out the damn van wasn’t nearly big enough even for my meager college-style furniture. Which meant multiple trips were necessary. At a round-trip time of at least 45 minutes.

My friend who showed up to help was a saint. Didn’t complain at all. We had to make three trips, IIRC. Once it was done I bought him dinner at a nice restaurant with plenty of beer. I still owe him. But even after the moving ordeal was done I still had to go back to the apartment to clean furiously. Until 4 AM in the morning.

I did manage to get all my security deposit back. Still, the whole thing was such a fucking chore that a year later I’m not “officially” unpacked - I threw all the boxes and lesser used shit into a spare bedroom in my new place. One year later, they’re all still sitting there.

Yeah, I should probably get around to that ;D. I suppose if I haven’t needed it in a year, I probably won’t need it ever.

I hate, hate moving.

48

As Kneadtoknow shared, I am indeed moved in.

Like Sarabellum, I had a multi-point move: I had stuff at my mom’s in SC, stuff at my brother’s in a different part of SC, stuff at Knead’s, and then stuff at the 2 stores where I had bought them.

Knead and I started moving some stuff in on Tuesday when I got the keys. Some of it, like the TVs, were because Time Warner was supposed to be hooking up my cable/internet on Thursday. And the rest was just whatever would fit in our small cars.

I paid $15 for the furniture place to deliver my couch Thursday night and considered it money well spent.

My brother offered to help me move and he has a 15-passenger van with a storage trailer on a hitch. So he and my mom brought up the stuff they had with them on Friday morning. We unloaded that and then stopped at Knead’s, loaded up the rest of the stuff at his place, and then headed to my old place and loaded that up and headed back and unloaded that. Than **Knead **and my brother picked up the mattresses at the store while mom and I went and picked up some lunch.

We all met back at the new place, had lunch, and then my brother drove back to SC. My mom stayed to help - she’s a powerhouse - and we got the kitchen cleaned, all the shelves lined with new shelf papers (that rubberized stuff) and went with me Saturday morning to do the final cleaning on the old place.

We made sure everything was spotless, but of course my old roommate found one thing to complain about: I had forgotten to put the dishwasher through before I left, and she was out of dishwashing detergent. rolls eyes

I have great friends & family. Knead has been a saint through all of this - helping to re-assemble the furniture we took apart, reconnect the computer, go with me while I shopped for all the staples, etc.

So weird but so awesome to have a place of my own again. I’m revelling in it.

49

:smack: Ok been there done that pin needle thing being impaled in car full of stuff but then add a spider… Yikes. :eek: