Good Advice to Simplify Your Move

If there's one thing I know how to do, it's move into a new house. In the last ten years I've moved at least once a year - sometimes for work, sometimes for love, sometimes for a better neighborhood, and sometimes to save money. I've used professional movers, rented trucks, and storage pods, and I've done it with a team of people working for me and all on my own.

I've never been very good at getting people to help me to move, partly because I don't want to then be asked to help them move. And I've found that the labor one can find for a hundred bucks a day outside just about any big box hardware store is going to be far more helpful and efficient than the labor you'll get from a bunch of disgruntled office colleagues anyway. My advice? Give your friends the day off and hire a couple freelancers to do the work with you.

I received a lesson in the reality of having friends help with a move a few years ago when I was in management at a company with about a hundred and fifty employees. Somehow news of my impending move spread through the office, and because of a general sentiment among the employees that being in the good graces of management was a good way to create job security, when the morning of that moved dawned employees started showing up at my house to help. When it was happening, I was grateful. It definitely made the day go faster, and it definitely made the job easier.

However, despite the help they gave me, that's the experience that taught me just how expensive it can be to have people do something for you for free. Nobody asked for a dime for their work, not even gas money for the drive there. But I felt obligated to buy lunch. And I felt obligated to buy some drinks when we were done. And by the end of it I'd dropped over five hundred dollars on that "free" labor. It would have been just as helpful and considerably cheaper to give a couple hundred bucks to each of two day laborers.

Another tip is that you've got to do the whole move, from soup to nuts, in one day if you're doing it yourself. It's nice to think that you can spread it out over a few days - or even a couple of weeks of packing things up - but the one-day move is really the only way to get it done. You get up that morning. you work until late that night. And it's done.

One benefit of the one-day move is that, while you move most of your stuff, you also start to become keen to throw out just about anything you can conceivably live without. Just like in a corporate layoff when economic tides allow management to rid itself of the bottom 20%, a move should allow you to rid yourself of at least 20% of your possessions. Urgency engenders willingness.

The method of conveyance is always up for debate when planning a move, but for my money the best way to go is a storage pod. The company brings it to you, leaves it for you to fill, hauls it to your new house, and leaves it for you to unpack. Even if you're doing a one-day move, you'll probably still want a storage space, and the pod puts the storage facility right outside your front door, where everything is easily accessible.

So just remember those three tips: hire strangers instead of using your friends, move everything in one day, and use storage pods to get it from point A to point B. If you do those three things, your next move will be much, much easier.