Blog 15 Packing and Getting Ready for the Move

Matson Container Ship on Way to Big Island

At this point, your reminder lists will stretch to well over two pages, e.g., donate books to library, find somewhere for the old computer, plan going away party, fix back door, hold garage sales, etc., etc., etc.

This is probably about when I started to lose it, right after Thanksgiving.  After all we were moving January 5, and I was thinking, “how will we ever get everything done?”  Luckily, my wife was a stabilizing influence.  Remember that before now all I had known were corporate moves.  She had seen the “real deal” several times -- before we had met.

Last Corporate Move -- 2006

We picked a moving company after getting several estimates, and knew that we wanted help packing.  Hardier souls can obviously do this themselves and save considerable money.  Partially as an economy measure we did box some things ourselves and even shipped certain items that we would need until our furnishings arrived and many of our books.

The US Postal Service has a phenomenal price on shipping books.  So after about ten trips to the post office we probably shipped forty boxes of books for maybe $200.

Container Ship and Tug Entering Hilo Harbor

Part of our concern was that when we had our possessions eyeballed by the moving companies, they agreed it looked like a tight fit for a 45-foot container (their biggest).  And we did not want to have to ship two of them.  So moving the books our self was a big help.  Our container ended up 99.5% full (whew ...)!