Our looooong day. Yay?

Today Tom and I did a long round-trip to the new house to drop off a FULL 14′ U-haul. Why, you may be asking?

Well, we somewhat recently found out that our last move was about 5,000 pounds over our allotted weight limit. Technically we could have been charged for it—but weren’t—so we didn’t want to take any chances this time. We’ve gotten rid of a lot of stuff (see the #40bagsin40days posts) but it still just felt like A LOT. Yes, we likely wouldn’t have been charged…but this way, we can make 100% sure AND we also get paid to do a “partial move” ourselves (they pay gas plus a per pound price, if I recall correctly).

So we had loaded up all of the small heavy things that we could—everything from his garage cabinets to pantry goods to tools to golf clubs to cat litter. We even took the garage freezer (so we wouldn’t have to empty and defrost it) and our new refrigerator (we were NOT leaving a $3000 refrigerator for our potential renters/buyers). We managed to stuff just over 5,000 pounds in the truck (quite impressive, I thought).

The original plan was for Tom to go up himself and unload then drive home. But once we decided to take the refrigerator and realized we needed to upgrade to a full truck vs. just a trailer, that meant Tom would need a way home (since it was a one-way rental). I could follow him up, but it didn’t seem to make much sense to drive if we could tow the car instead. Loooong story short, we ended up with a full trailer (vs just a tow dolly) which likely ended up to be more difficult than the dolly would have been…but it was nice not having to drive two cars.

So this is how we traveled to Virginia.

Unfortunately, the whole road trip part SUCKED. With such a beast of a load plus towing the vehicle, our speed was limited—and then of course we hit traffic around Stafford (the parking lot that is 95) so it took us 6.5 hours to get there (best case scenario the trip should take five hours). So, ugh.

The unloading didn’t go too badly—it was warm but not ungoldly hot. We met a neighbor who was very nice and has a 4yo and 2 week old and was excited someone was finally moving in (it’s been empty for like six months). She told us the street is mostly Army and Air Force—we’ll be one of the few Marines. We met with the landlord to pay our rent and pet deposit. We asked about the fence (as it wasn’t up yet) and he told us he was just waiting for the association to approve his request. It’s been 1.5 months since we signed the paperwork so either he didn’t ask right away or the association is slow—neither of which is a good thing in my mind.

I had also taken some measurements of our stuff to the new house so I could see just how things would fit—and some stuff is going to be TIGHT. The space looks big, but once you put our big stuff in it, it doesn’t look quite as big. Our table and chairs will fit in the eat-in kitchen space, but it’s going to be close—and we may not be able to open the leaf…because our huge sectional will be taking up ALL the living space. (I’m going to have our real estate lady go back and check measurements of a space in the basement to see if there’s room for the sectional there instead. We may end up selling it if it won’t fit nicely. We bought it for this house with the HUGE bonus room…which most houses don’t have a room that big and it’s very hard to fit.) Our table would fit fine (with the leaf, too) in the actual dining room space, but I honesty don’t want to eat there every day—it’s not convenient to the kitchen at all plus it has white carpet. There’s also no room for our current island (where we have the dog and cat food) in the kitchen…so not sure where we’ll be putting that food or the island. It’s just bizarre that this house is SO huge but the space isn’t allotted quite how I’d prefer (like our master bedroom is twice as big as it needs to be). So, time will tell on all that stuff. It will all work…it will just take time.

So then, the ride home. Ugh. It was worse than the ride up. Apparently there had been construction on 95 South so traffic was already backed up. Then there were storms farther South so that had backed up traffic even more. And then there was an accident somewhere along the line… The parallel road (Route 1) which we can sometimes take to escape 95 was also backed up due to trees down from the storm. It took us almost two hours to go 38 miles…and took us seven hours to get home. We had hoped/planned to be home by 8 but it turned into 10:30. At least the kids were in good hands—Virginia was babysitting. 🙂