Planning a Move

"I promised to help, and I'm not backing off from that, but ... "

As  previously mentioned, Ellie and I bought a townhouse just after Thanksgiving. Of course, we told our friends and received both expressions of congratulations and offers of help. Three offers stand out. 

Our friend Jane, who had been a huge help to Ellie when, as executor of the will, Ellie sold our friend Loretta's town house, offered help with anything we needed doing. She was involved from early on until we were moved and settled. 

Our son's girl friend, Wendy, who has quite a bit of recent experience packing houses and moving, offered her truck to help with the actual move and to help sort through our stuff. She was an enormous help  getting started with the process of deciding which of the three categories
( keep, don't keep, not sure ) individual pieces of our stuff fell into. 

Two people, neither of whom do I know well, surprised me with their offers to help, as well. When I saw one of these two later, she said, "I offered to help and I stand by that offer but I would urge you to consider a company called Serious about Moving, ( I am not promoting anyone here, and this name is a fiction. ) as they moved my mother from a long-lived in house and were absolutely wonderful. They do as much or as little as you want and they do it well."

This post is about the moving company. In the future, I'll post about Jane's help, Wendy's help and the actual move.

We called Serious about Moving and they sent Jean ( fictional ) out to talk to us. Jean is the person who would serve as our move manager, the person who would coordinate whatever work we wanted Serious about Moving to do. She explained Serious about Moving's "womb to tomb" capability.

"After closing," she began, "I'll meet  you at the new house and help figure out how to arrange the furniture to fit the new space." As if to bolster her street cred, she got out a tape measure and counted and measured every piece of furniture we planned to move. When finished, she had a handwritten list of eighty-one pieces of furniture ( I had no idea we had so much furniture ), along with their widths and lengths, which she would use to execute the furniture mapping she would be helping with. "Two moving trucks, for sure," she said, adding, "and, I'm estimating, one hundred to one hundred-fifty boxes for your 'stuff.'" We were stunned. 

She told us Serious about Moving could do the packing, moving, and unpacking if we wanted. Or only the moving and unpacking ( of course they could not warranty the boxes they didn't pack, and we understood that ), or only the moving. She pointed out that the unpacking would be done by the same people who did the packing, so they'd be familiar with our 'stuff' and know how we had had it. The boxes and packing material would not be our problem, either; they would haul that away. "After you're moved," she went on, "we have yet another service to help sort through what was left and decide 'keep', 'don't keep', or 'still not sure'. We can also appropriately implement 'don't keep' on the stuff in that category. Recycle, trash, donate, as appropriate."

In addition to charging for boxes used, they charge by the hour, Jean continued, so if we were concerned about a budget she could keep track of the costs in real time, keep us appraised, and they'd give us the option to quit when we reached our budget limit. The way she talked, if we wanted, we would have to do virtually nothing. This appealed to us; we hired them ... for packing, moving and unpacking.

Wendy's help got a great deal of our stuff into "Keep", "Toss" and "Don't know" categories and appropriate boxes; she, our sons and I physically moved boxes so that groups of boxes were in those three categories and in physically distinct parts of the house. This left two rooms in the basement untouched, and a large closet in the guest room. These  rooms contained  unsorted material not to be moved by Serious about Moving. Prior to moving day, we moved, perhaps, ten or twelve "keep" boxes ourselves
( fragile items, sensitive material, miscellaneous stuff we knew we wanted to know the location of at all times ) to the new house.

By closing, Ellie and I had spent a fair amount of time at the new place and had a pretty good idea of where we wanted to put most of the furniture. We had some concerns about getting all our bedroom furniture into the new space ( the bedroom in our old house is enormous ) and how our decisions about the living room furniture would work out. 

On cue, after closing, Jean met us at the new place, a roll of blue tape in one hand and the pages with the eighty-one furniture names and measurements in the other. As we went through the various rooms, talking about where we wanted each item, Jean checked the item off the list and put tape on the floor, identifying the corners of the various pieces of furniture. The checklist ensured we placed each of the items we'd be moving, the tape marks ensured the collection would actually fit as we wanted, and we were gratified. All the bedroom furniture we planned for the bedroom fit; we had to make some rather minor adjustments to the living room layout; there were a few items we'd forgotten to place that Jean asked about because they were not checked off her list. 

At the end of an hour or so, we had an implementable plan.

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