On moving

Our packers were good.  Really good.  The team of four had us packed and loaded in 12 hours of work.  From her experience with professional movers as a military kid, Rachel expected it to take twice as long.

The only drawback was, they were constantly packing things we weren't quite ready to take.  It became a running joke, how we'd as each other if we'd seen such-and-such an object.  The answer was always, "Yes; it's already gone."  The only really annoying loss was the dustpan.  And I made them bring back our kitchen chairs so Ellis and Merrie would have a place to sit Wednesday night.

This is a minor irritation though compared with how vastly improved the moving experience is when professionals do most of the work.  This comes at a price: the estimate was $12,000 for our move.  (Paid by Rackspace -- woot!)  But we are renting in San Antonio, because (a) my division is moving to a new location within the next year, and it's hard to find a place optimal for commuting to both, and (b) we want to be more familiar with the city before committing to buying.  So, the odds are very good that we'll be moving again soon, the hard way.

But, you can get a good approximation of the deluxe moving treatment by hiring packing and/or loading help from e.g. movinghelp.com.  You're looking at $50-60 per man-hour of labor, which sounds steep for not-very-skilled work -- after watching them, I wouldn't call it unskilled, for sure -- but if the five-star rated movers there are anything like the ones who packed us, you're paying for (a) experience and (b) hustle.  They packed carefully but quickly and when they loaded they ran everywhere.  

(The final part of the secret to blitzkreig packing was that they had vast quantities of all sorts of boxes in their truck.  I had no idea there were specialized boxes for some of those things.  And using boxes of a uniform size made packing the truck easier, too.  So as much of a rip-off as their prices are, I guess I'm down for buying a metric buttload of all the various boxes at u-haul next time, since you can return the unused ones.  But be careful to save the receipt.)

So I'm thinking, I could totally pay for packing help, then call in the church quorum to help load.  (There is an unwritten rule somewhere that the quorum is happy to un/load, but you're on your own for packing.  Probably because unskilled packing is virtually guaranteed to be a disaster.)  ~$1000 to get packed in a day?  I think that is probably worth it.