The new thing in moving

Dateline: above the sold garage, 23 May 2005, 54 days to the move

Brother-in-law talks my wife into abandoning plan to have established moving company pack us up and ship us to Indy for lotsa money (roughly $15k), and instead using the PODS approach offered by the company of the same name. Here's the deal: you can and order a container (basically the storage part of a big U-Haul sized truck) and the company drives to your house and gently places one on your driveway. It costs you $200 a month to have. You take your time to fill it up with stuff, then call them back and they pick up. They will take where you want or store it for you.

For us, the deal with work like this: mid June Pod #1 appears and we fill over three days, then it's picked up and goes off to Providence climate-controlled warehouse. At the end of June, we do it all over again, packing up the rest of the house we plan to put into storage during the home-building process in Indiana. Then the week before we leave, Pod #3 shows up and we pack what we want to keep in our apartment for six months (or more), and when that Pod reaches the Providence warehouse, all three go to Indianapolis to the company's warehouse there. A day later Pod #3 shows up at our apartment complex and we'll have several days to unload before the company takes it away for good. When we move into the new house, we'll move ourselves from the apartment and Pod #1 and Pod #2 will appear, as desired, in our new driveway for us to unload as we see fit. Whether on our driveway or in the warehouse, it's always $200 a month per pod, but this way we pack most of our house only once for the new house, repacking only that which we take into the apartment.

Oh, and it costs $7k instead of $15k, even with all the packing stuff we purchase (but then also get to keep, like a high-end hand truck).

Spouse Vonne greatly prefers this because she dreaded the tumult of the movers in the house doing everything so fast, plus she knows I can disassemble and pack all the antique furniture (some of it amazingly complex and idiosyncratic) carefully. Our insurance covers either way, so this seems the better route.

Got to give it to that Todd. He's always on top of the newest business practice, being an inveterate salesman himself.

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