The only time I hate my hobbies is when it’s time to move. I have tons of books, and lots of awkward/large objects (loom, sewing tables, bookcases, etc). I own very little outside of those things, but the books/crafting stuff is significant enough to make moving a huge and awful chore. Unpacking and setting up a new home is fun, but packing is one of the worst things in the world when you have a lot of stuff. I HATE packing. You pack and pack and pack and think you’re done, but somehow you keep opening cabinets or drawers or closets and more stuff has materialized. You’re bruised and tired and you know that if you stop moving you’ll sit down and start crying and never move again, so you have to force yourself to keep going because there’s a deadline and it’s gotta get done. It’s THE WORST.

The last few times I moved I used U-Haul, which is a process usually fraught with some kind of mechanical and/or customer service nightmare. When I moved from Colorado to Seattle I did it in a giant U-Haul truck with two humans, two large dogs, and a cat in the cab, towing my car. It was absolutely awful. Since then I’ve moved a couple more times with U-Haul, all with varying degree of awfulness, so I decided to investigate other methods this time. I won’t actually be moving into my house until June 1st, so I needed a combo of moving and storage, and all things considered a pod was the same price as a truck, fuel, temporary storage, and another local truck in early June. Plus, using a pod meant I could road trip back in a much less stressful way.

I used a U-Pack ReloCube from ABF Moving, and so far I have nothing but good things to say about the company. I shopped around before deciding, and the info is below for anyone considering moving this way. ABF was the only company that wasn’t completely sleazy and salesy, and every encounter I’ve had with them thus far has been professional, helpful, and pleasant. The people on the phone were great, the forklift driver was great, they offered me a few free days of storage since I need just a hair over a full month (the other guys wanted me to pay two full months of storage), etc. In short, they were the only company that seemed interested in actually helping me move, and not just in taking as much of my money as possible. PODS and 1-800-PACK-RAT were so sleazy and high-pressure that I actually had to hang up the phone on one of them because they wouldn’t let me go without giving them a credit card number, even though I said I was only comparing prices and wasn’t ready to order. Being a sales goon is the quickest way to lose my business, even if you have a better price. Luckily, ABF had great reviews in the various places I checked, were super nice, and had the best price. Win-win.

I packed everything into the same size boxes in order to make stacking as easy as possible. I bought 30 small moving boxes during my first run to Lowe’s, but burned through them before I even finished boxing up my books. I think I ended up with about 42 small boxes of stuff, two medium boxes, and four or five miscellaneous boxes. Other than that, the rest of the pod is my heavy sofa bed, several chairs, a million bookshelves broken down to their flat pieces, and a bunch of miscellaneous loose stuff.

I decided to limit myself to only bringing as much stuff as I could fit into one pod, and when it was dropped off I regretted that decision. But in the end, I’m very surprised at how much I was able to fit into this pod. It’s much more spacious than it looks from the outside. In the end, the only sacrifice was my vacuum, because I could fit a bunch of small stuff into the space I’d reserved for it. And I could have fit it if I’d re-arranged some things, but at that point I was too tired to care.

Moral of the story: packing is the worst hell imaginable, but ABF makes it as close to not-terrible as it’s possible to be.

The forklift guy was so fast that I couldn’t even get an action shot of the pod delivery.

Much more spacious than it seems from the outside.

Whew! I’d like to never do this again.