Someone I know is moving back east, and is having a lot of non-furniture stuff shipped. He said there’s a company that provides bins, and whatever you can cram in there, they’ll ship. And if I understood correctly, they charge a flat rate, not by weight. Does this sound right, and if so, what’s the name of the company?
Search by “storage container, moving”
Note, I just grabbed 3 for the purposes of posting.
Thank you!
My experiences shipping to Alaska (on a barge so it may not be the same)
Two ways of shipping:
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I brought a bunch of stuff down to a shipping company, they had special times for non-commercial walk up shippers, they basically unlocked a shipping container set up with heavy duty lockable curtains spaced throughout the container, you paid by how many segments you filled up.
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They forklifted out a pallet and you filled it up, they plastic wrapped the pallet and you paid by cubic footage.
This was the easiest and cheapest way I found to do what I needed, but it can also be a bit intimidating for some people because these businesses are usually in a pretty industrial part of town and are not really set up as walkup customer friendly. All the businesses I worked with seemed to realize this and go out of their way to be really helpful when you call.
If you have the money, or a whole lot of stuff and don’t want the physical labor involved best to just use a moving company like the ones listed above.
I used ABF to move from Seattle to Boston and it worked great. It’ll get knocked around a lot (same with a moving van) so keep stuff padded and don’t put too much weight on top of other items.
We used PODS a bit more than a year ago for a cross-country move and it worked well. One huge distinction to PODS vs the you-load trucks is that the PODS container sits on your driveway so you can walk right in with boxes, and heavy things only have to be lifted about two inches, rather than shoved and dragged up a ramp. After you’ve put the 75th box into the container, your legs will thank you for not having to do all that climbing.
You do need to pack carefully - as Deeg notes, your stuff will be banged around on a cross-country drive.
Another nice thing with PODS is that if your destination is uncertain, or if it won’t be immediately available for move-in, the containers can be stored at the PODS warehouse.