I hate moves. The last time I moved was when I came to Ottawa with my family. Disassembling our house in Lima was a huge job. I remember hours and hours of piling up things, putting them in boxes, discarding things, putting them in the garbage, giving them away or selling them.
After almost three years, it came time to move from our Ottawa home to a new one. Fortunately, the house we were living in was not big, because we had decided not to furnish it completely since we knew it was going to be just a temporary house.
First thing: my husband and I had to find out what was the process and costs of moving within Canada. What we found out is that there are different options in the way someone can move house.
Basically, there are two ways of moving. One way is to hire a professional company that takes care of everything, from moving your furniture from the house to the big truck, to placing the goods in your new home. Another way is to rent a truck and do it yourself with the help of friends, or by paying workers who charge by the hour.
You have to evaluate your options. In our case, we are a family of 5, and we had to move from one house to another, so we thought that moving for ourselves would be difficult and complicated. We chose, instead, to pay for professionals.
And how much does it cost? Well, more than a thousand dollars.
The move started at 8 o’clock on the dot. The big truck appeared with three men, one was mainly the organizer, and the other two were the strong guys in charge of lifting and carrying our things.
It was a rainy day. How lucky, I thought. This is going to be a mess! But I was wrong. They put a long piece of carpet in the floor to avoid bringing dirt inside the house. They were very careful with our things and provided us with big boxes especially designed to hang our clothes, just like wardrobes.
Our duties were just giving them directions: “this is fragile, watch out,” and “those boxes just contain clothes.” When they arrived at the new house, we had to guide them with things like: “this goes to the salon” and “this goes to the master bedroom.”
After 6 hours of hard work, our things were in place in our new home. Mission accomplished. We paid, and that was it.
But if one wants to save some hundreds of bucks, doing your own move can be an option. For that, you have to rent a truck and hire some workers.
The cost of renting a truck in U-Haul goes from 85 dollars to 102 dollars a day depending on the vehicle size. Then you have to hire two, three, or four workers, and pay them more or less 25 dollars an hour each.
But if you have friends that are willing to help you, lucky you! So, moving on your own can be half, or even less, the cost of hiring a moving company.
We were considering doing the moving on our own but in the end, we thought that it would be very stressful and a tremendous amount of work and we opted for the most expensive option. We have no regrets because everything went smoothly – just as we wanted it.
What option would you prefer? Would you hire professionals, or do it yourself? If you have a moving experience, I’d love to hear about it. Take care.
Excellent information.
Thank you