Tuesday, December 31, 2013

Moving from NY to CA

Earlier in 2013 we found out that we were moving to California. It was not a planned it was more unexpected, a surprise - a shock lol.

The DH went to California on his first business trip for 2 weeks during Easter, it quickly turned into 3 weeks. All he could tell me was how fantastic and beautiful it was, the people we nice and they loved him there, the weather was perfect, and then he says theres a job opening for exactly what he does.

I quickly said why dont you apply and see what happens, imagine how surprised we were to see he was offered the job and a transfer was in process, We were moving to California.

Now I always wanted to move out of New York but most New Yorkers move south on the east coast not the west coast lol.

He returned back to NY and stayed for only about 2-3 weeks and was gone again. In a short time I had to sell all the things in our house, put the house up for sale, pack and plan a move. They put him in a hotel and gave him a rental car for a few months. Time was quickly running away from us.  At first I was going to stay in NY till October as I had previous commitments booked and I felt bad having to cancel events. Then there was our child, should I have her go to school in NY for a few months and then move?

In the end we cancelled those events and decided to move in August. It turned out the week we picked was still bad as school had started in the middle of the month so she was  going to miss a little over a week of school.  The school district told us to register her for school on August 1st even though she wasn't going to attend right away but to insure she was able to attend.

After much research we shipped the DH motorcycle, drove across in my Prius and used ABF to get our stuff that we were taking to CA.  Now we got rid of all our furniture, sold, donated and threw away a ton of stuff!  There were many options to this, at first we were going to rent a truck and tow my car, we even thought of using one of those pods but that was even more. To rent a truck it meant over 1K in just gas, plus around 3K for the rental and tow, not counting the hotels, meals and where exactly were we going to place our two cats and dog. We thought of using pods and fly but that was even more.  We found ABF which allowed us to use truck space and it was hauled. It was based on space used which made sense.   It was more expensive if they took the truck to us to load and unload so what we did was rent a truck to load, drive it up to the ABF station and load the ABF truck. We reserved 15 feet of space and ended up using only 9 which was fantastic! We saved a lot of money doing it this way, thing was it meant that when our stuff got to CA we had to rent another truck, load it from the stuff off the ABF truck and drive to our new place.

It sounds a bit crazy loaded and unloaded multiple times but it worked out and it was a lot cheaper then any other way we found. We loaded the ABF truck on a Friday it arrived the following Monday. It was not that bad, our stuff shifted a little bit and some containers sank and bent out of shape but I dont think anything actually broke on us.

Renting the truck locally was a flat rate plus milage, plus replacement gas on both ends of the trip, the ABF truck quoted us for 15 feet and had an adjustment of $119 for each foot taken away or added. The truck cost about $100 on each side, the ABF truck cost just under 3K.  Our Prius cost about $200 in gas, hotel and food we were going to pay no matter which if we drove the car or truck ourselves.

So our journey began on route 80 heading west.