It’s become very clear that we are not very good at keeping a blog updated on a regular basis. The point of this post will be to catch everyone up with all the “exciting” and “fun” stuff that are part of the goings on we’ve experienced these past couple months. Please note the quotation marks and understand I’m making the little finger gestures to accompany them.
I’m going to do a really LONG part 1 that should catch everyone up to earlier this week before Emily left for Oahu.
First, we had a big garage sale. We’ve tried really hard to embrace the mantra “if you don’t use it, sell it” with this move. We have some friends who purge their belongings every 6 months or so. I like the idea but I fail in practice. I think I could very easily become a pack rat if my wife let me. So yes, garage sale #1. Apparently you are only allowed to have 2 yard sales a year in San Antonio and you have to buy a permit for each one. The peeps down the street must not have gotten that memo. We didn’t end up getting rid of everything we would have liked to, but overall the garage sale was a success.
Next we started sorting the things we wanted to take and packed up things that were not being used regularly like books, decorations, doilies (Em’s note: we don’t actually have doilies, we aren’t 80!)…
All the while we were doing things at home, we were waiting to hear back from Em’s work about getting move expense estimates. They approved a $12,000 relocation budget to cover our move which we had to stay under, otherwise it came out of our pocket. The fun part was that they had to wait to hear back from a 3rd party company, who was waiting to hear back from another company before the info could trickle down and we could get an idea of how close we were going to be with moving household goods, shipping a car, plane tickets and temporary living.
We pretty much held our breath waiting to receive the shipping estimate for our household goods, knowing that was going to be the biggie. We had done as much pre-homework as we could on this and were coming up with numbers that ate up roughly half our budget. That was right where we needed it to be to stay on course, but we were still nervous and couldn’t make a decision on anything until we got the “official” word.
Meanwhile, the clock was ticking and Emily’s departure date was quickly approaching.
We received our first warning sign in the form of the “official” estimate for shipping our vehicle. They wanted $3300 right out the gate.
Bah. Soooo, now we’re at $8700. It still could work.. staying positive.
Weeks went by with constant emails and requests for updates and it felt like everyone on the end of the phone we couldn’t personally slap was taking their sweet knuckle dragging time. When Emily moved from GA to TX almost two years ago with the same kind of set up, she had absolutely no problems. Everything was prompt and organized. She received her estimates quickly and knew exactly what things would cost within days. In the end she used just over half her allotted budgeted amount. We were crossing our fingers for the similar results.
Well.. we should have crossed harder. After almost a month, they finally sent out an appraiser to look over our meager belongings (and we do mean meager, our house in Texas is a 2 bedroom 1200 square foot historic home and we planned on ditching about half of our furniture as it is). It took another week before we heard back the official dollar amount.
$14,000.
Yeah, that’s a coma.
We were floored. Shipping our things alone was sitting at almost 2 grand over our ENTIRE approved budget for the move. With the car, over 5k. If we went forward we’d be out thousands of dollars just on getting our few things to Hawaii.. not even to mention the plane tickets, temp housing, etc..
We sorta freaked out.
After much shoving of children into local swimming pools, screaming at the neighbors’ garden gnomes and eating sloppy joes on a white couch without napkins (Em’s note: We never did any of these things, my husband is weird), we went to plan B. For several days we called to get our own estimates outside of Emily’s company. The first roadblock we hit was that apparently all the moving companies contract with the same local appraiser and almost immediately gave us very similar numbers. And in researching some of the bids we got for our initial research, we found those companies had big fat Fs from the BBB. Things were not looking very good for us. On top of this thrilling news, we FINALLY heard back from the temp-housing assistant who, after literally WEEKS of waiting for housing options, came back with a single $3500 a month option.
Seriously. I mean, these people know what Emily’s pay is like, they all work with or for the same company. Who in their right minds would think we could afford a $3500 a month apartment at our pay grade, especially on top of all these other expenses? To give some rough numbers.. so far the total “official” estimated numbers for our move added up to somewhere north of $20,000! Almost double our approved moving budget. That’s without airfare.
After yet more freaking out we went back to the drawing board. It required a swift kick to the curb of all the “official” avenues that were obviously useless and not in business to truly help us out. We would have to find our own way to make this work and stay within budget.
The first thing we did was call about the car as the clock was quickly ticking down and Emily would need it a day or two after she landed in Oahu. Thankfully, it was pretty painless… not one quote we got back for shipping the car was over $1600. That’s $800 less than what we were told before. We booked it and a few days later we watched as two strange men loaded it up on a big tractor trailer and drove off into the San Antonio sunset. Again, fingers crossed.
Next was tracking down a more affordable household goods move solution. We quickly exhausted all the regular avenues of movers coming over with a truck and carefully wrapping our stuff, properly loading it and hand delivering it to our doorstep in Oahu. Every company we contacted used the same appraiser who did our “official” quote.. so the numbers were extremely close and completely unaffordable for us.
The only other option we had was PODS which meant a lot of work for me and I wasn’t happy about this idea at all. That is until I got their quote for the total cost of everything and it came out to being right at half our budgeted amount. After a quick backflip, we locked down the price and scheduled the drop off date. The new plan is to pack as much as I can in the POD destined for Hawaii, get a small storage building for things we can’t bear to part with but don’t need in Hawaii, and trash/donate anything left over.
For the first time in almost a month, we felt like we were officially back on track.
We are certainly not out of the woods yet. There are quite a few stressful unknowns we’re currently dealing with as well as several in the next couple months. Emily shipped out Monday on Labor Day and due to the whirlwind of things going on since she arrived hasn’t had time to get much of a feel of things yet other than telling me it’s “beautiful”.
With that, maybe I’ll let her take it from here.
trying on hawaii 