In addition to our work purging the things we didn't need, we started to figure out what we could get boxed up in preparation for listing the house. While it was very early to be packing, we knew that we could easily cut the things that we were keeping in half and still have plenty to use for living over the next few months. Of course it wasn't quite that straight forward, as we found that even half of what we had left was ALOT. Things like holiday decorations really add up, and when you're trying to get light, they suddenly seem to take up way too much space.
These things got divided up into things that should stay with the family (so needed to find someone who wanted them), things that we could post to sell, things that we could donate to the Goodwill for someone else to enjoy and things that we should throw away (and probably should have a long time ago). Fortunately, nearly everything that we offered to family they gladly took, which made it feel good that it would stay near. We are very grateful to our family for taking these items and carrying on their heritage. Some of these thing came with a caveat - they could have it...for now :-). We aspire to get those things back when we find a new house to own.
We made several, several Suburban-loads that were donated to the Goodwill - which they mostly accepted without question. We did run into a few items that were not accepted, which was frustrating as they were still in very good shape but didn't fall under Goodwill's donation needs. In fairness, this was during the middle of the COVID pandemic, so the Goodwill operations were significantly scaled back. Some items we found were easier to get rid of by putting near the street and marking with "Free" - beach toys, sporting gear & flower pots all went pretty quickly. Other things that were fairly valuable and seemed like they would go quickly never were picked up...not even stolen.
We also realized that we could take a good portion of the "throw away" stuff to be recycled, at the least not adding to landfills and at best getting us a few dollars. We found good places to get money for scrap and to recycle electronics - even broken refrigerators (for a small fee). These constituted another several Suburban-loads.
When it came to boxing up the things that we decided to take with us, the early purging paid dividends again since there were now plenty of empty storage bins. These made it easy to pack as we went and spared us from buying expensive packing boxes & supplies. We had also saved a few months of Blue Apron/Home Chef boxes that worked great for heavy books and dishes (we’d kept some of the foam insulation too). We worked hard to fill every empty space with something, putting items inside containers and adding small odds & ends into the gaps. As boxes were packed we labeled + stacked them in emptied rooms, ready to be loaded later.
Our next challenge was twofold - how many trucks to rent and how many drivers we had. Since Grace, Allyson and Emma each had a car, in addition to our Suburban, Jeep and RV, we quickly realized that either we had to make multiple cross-country trips or shed some vehicles. Doing some rough math we estimated that each vehicle would cost around $1,000 in fuel to move which wasn‘t appealing. After weighing our options, we decided that selling the girls’ cars and buying them again in Tennessee would be cheaper and limit the number of trips.
We toyed with the idea of driving two rented trucks and the Suburban towing Don’s 1950 Chevy in one trip, then flying back to drive the RV towing the Jeep later. While this sounded good, we’d have needed to store the RV + Jeep somewhere and would have left the girls alone in a unfamiliar place, so we dropped that scenario.
Now we figured we could drive two rented 26’ U-Haul trucks, the Suburban towing the old car and the RV towing the Jeep - we’d just need four drivers that were confident with large trucks or towing. The issue we ran into here was that the prices on U-Haul trucks had more than doubled since we began planning this adventure, meaning that the original $4,500/truck estimate was now over $9,000/truck! Without any other reasonable options, we committed to make this one what we went with.
The first step to make this happen was to get rid of some cars. Since Grace had her conversion van with her in Pensacola, we decided her Oldsmobile Alero was the first car that could go. With some deep cleaning and a new battery, we got this listed for sale online and started parking it with ‘For Sale‘ signs near busy roads. There wasn’t immediate interest but we decided to keep to our plan and give it time.
As soon as Allyson finished her child care gig, we gave her car (Volkswagen Jetta) the same deep clean treatment and got it listed online. The next day after putting the ads online we got several inquiries, and by the end of the day we had her car sold. The best part was that it sold for more than Allyson bought it over four years earlier, and went to a high school senior - just like when she bought it!
Emma wanted to keep working through May, so we waited until her last week of work to deep clean and list her Ford Taurus. While it wasn't the same day, within a week we had several offers and were able to sell her car for what we paid for it originally - counted as another win.
After several weeks being listed and parked along the highway, we were starting to get concerned about selling Grace's car, but suddenly we received several offers and were able to sell it for her original purchase price from six years ago!
We were pretty happy that the girls all were able to have cars for several years for essentially no cost - a nice side effect of the pandemic economy.
With the cars sold and a good stream of items being sold on Facebook Marketplace/Craigslist, we assessed how much room we'd really need - the answer wasn't encouraging. We still felt like we had more than we could fit in the two trucks, so we pushed ourselves to cut even deeper into the things we planned to keep. We also started to consider that we may need to add another trailer to the plan, but that created a shortage of drivers if we weren't towing the Jeep with the RV. Motivated to get even lighter we pressed on with shedding non-essentials, wrestling over the decisions about what would make the final cut.
With this being our longest move (by far), we were not sure exactly what made sense to take or what to expect during the trip - all part of the thrill!
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