A Moving Experience

I am offi­cial­ly all moved to Wash­ing­ton DC! This time around, I did a kind of hybrid move and boy am I glad I did. I tried out a new com­pa­ny called HireA­Helper and I’m pret­ty sure it’s the only rea­son my body isn’t 100% of the way dead.

This whole endeav­or came to be rather quick­ly. After find­ing out I did­n’t get the job in Cal­i­for­nia, I went all in on mov­ing in with my friend Erin. Her room­mate unex­pect­ed­ly moved out at the end of Feb­ru­ary and left the per­fect vacan­cy for me to slide into. (side note: you should def­i­nite­ly fol­low her on Insta­gram. She’s tak­en a lot of great pho­tos of my cute cat!)

At the same time, my friends back home in Chica­go were gear­ing up for a fun week­end to cel­e­brate a birth­day and I could­n’t miss out on that. The time­line looked like this:

Thurs­day night: move the cat over to our new home
Fri­day morn­ing: Fly to Chica­go and have fun!
Fri­day: do all the fun things!
Sat­ur­day: eat all the things!
Sun­day: more of the above!

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Unfor­tu­nate­ly, all good things have to come to an end and my week­end of fun and glut­tony was no excep­tion. Mon­day morn­ing I left Chica­go to dri­ve to my home­town. While there I had lunch with my best friend, ran some errands, packed the rental truck and had din­ner with my fam­i­ly. Tues­day I got up ear­ly and drove across Illi­nois, Indi­ana, and Ohio. 9 hours in a box truck on the inter­state with no cruise con­trol is not what I clas­si­fy as fun.

Wednes­day I drove across West Vir­ginia, Penn­syl­va­nia, and Mary­land to my new DC home. I arrived com­plete­ly and utter­ly exhaust­ed. Thank­ful­ly, I decid­ed to hire movers to help me unpack the truck and I don’t think I’ve made a bet­ter deci­sion recent­ly. I went through HireA­Helper and found the process to be super easy. Way eas­i­er than haul­ing all my crap down a nar­row flight of stairs in a Vic­to­ri­an house!

The movers I hired through the com­pa­ny did an amaz­ing job! It took me and 3 friends the bet­ter part of 2 hours to pack the truck. It took 2 movers just about 45 min­utes to unpack the truck and move every­thing up sev­er­al flights of stairs. That’s incred­i­ble! I high­ly rec­om­mend both Hire A Helper and the local mov­ing com­pa­ny for help with a move. I’m pret­ty sure my days of lug­ging every­thing up and down stairs is over.

I also dis­cov­ered it costs just about $300 to stock my kitchen with food. I moved in with basi­cal­ly no food, so I need­ed to stock up on basi­cal­ly every­thing. Condi­ments, cook­ing ingre­di­ents, fruit, veg­eta­bles.…. you name it, I need­ed it. My room­mate has a Cost­co mem­ber­ship, so I real­ly got to stock up!

On the oth­er hand, we are set on things like rice, syrup and olive oil for many months to come, so it was­n’t all just for this month.

I also dis­cov­ered the pow­er of reser­va­tions. Now, I have known to reserve things well before I need them for a long time. Sev­er­al things on this trip I did not get a reser­va­tion and I added a lit­tle bit of unnec­es­sary angst into my trip because of it. I thought about reserv­ing a rental car in Chica­go to dri­ve to my home­town and thought “how hard can it be to get a car to dri­ve one way from Chica­go?”. Turns out.…. real­ly freak­ing hard. Every sin­gle car was reserved or not avail­able for a one-way trip. I end­ed up hav­ing to go 45 min­utes out of my way to get a car. Annoy­ing but not the end of the world. If that failed, I just would’ve tak­en the bus home, but I did­n’t want to do that because it would’ve tak­en longer to get home and I want­ed to have lunch with my best friend.

I had a sim­i­lar sto­ry with the hotel room in West Vir­ginia. It’s right off the inter­state, it’s a Tues­day night in March, they have like 8 hotels right there, how hard can it be to get a room? Turns out I had to call 3 dif­fer­ent hotels before I found one with an open room. Instead of stay­ing in a nice hotel with a hot tub and sauna, I stayed at a Super 8. It was­n’t bad, but I could’ve done better.

I did, how­ev­er, have a reser­va­tion for the rental truck and it saved my life. I want­ed a 14′ truck, but the only one avail­able when I did the reser­va­tion was a 16′ truck. More room than I need­ed, but not bad. On the dri­ve from Chica­go, I get a call from the rental place. They don’t have any 16′ trucks but they do have a 26′ truck. I was­n’t thrilled with the idea of dri­ving a 26′ truck through the nar­row streets of DC but if the alter­na­tive was haul­ing all of my stuff on my back, I’d pick the truck. For­tu­nate­ly, he called me back and said they found one 90 miles away and it would be ready for me by the sched­uled time. My reser­va­tion came through as he also said anoth­er cou­ple came in want­i­ng it but I reserved it first so I had first dibs. Win!

Now that I’ve been in my new place for a few days, I am work­ing on set­tling in and get­ting my stuff orga­nized. It’s hard­er than I thought it would be. I’m a recov­er­ing pack rat and get­ting rid of things is tough for me, but I’m get­ting bet­ter at it! My room­mate is super gra­cious about the card­board box­es and stuff clut­ter­ing up our place. I should make some mon­ey back from sell­ing dupli­cate things I no longer need like an extra suit­case, plates, and some Ikea table tops.

Wish me luck as I unpack more things and get set­tled in for real!

Thanks for read­ing! Have you moved cross coun­try before? Did you DIY the move or hire movers? Sound off in the com­ments below!