Moving Out

Renovating your house can be exciting, but moving is just plan miserable. We had less than a month to find a place to live and move EVERYTHING out of the house, basement, and garage. Since we aren't going to have a lot of spare cash to blow on rent, we focused on finding a place that would meet our basic needs and decided we'd put most of our stuff in storage.

Looking for temporary housing on Craigslist in January was impossible. Every single listing was for inauguration rentals. Even when I searched for "Arlington -inauguration", 99% of the posts were still just for the period around Jan 20 -- they just spelled it wrong. We looked into some rental houses in our neighborhood, but we couldn't afford upwards of $3200/month on rent. A realtor showed us some condos in the area, but we couldn't stomach paying $1900/month for a teeny 1-bedroom with a bunch of amenities we'd rarely use (pool, fitness center, concierge, putting green!?).

I finally lucked out the Friday before the inauguration. I found a posting on Craigslist for a 2BR/2BA not far from our house for $1800/month, which was our upper limit. I called the management office and was told that unit had already been rented, but when I explained my situation, she suggested I look at a smaller 2BR apartment in a neighboring building that they also managed. The tenant was relocating for work and needed someone to take over the last 4 months of her lease -- starting Feb 1 -- and then we could go month-to-month after that. The best part: $1260/month! The apartment was eerily reminiscent of our old place in Rosslyn, but lacked the spectacular view. Still, when I told Josh about it, he was so excited about the rent that he was willing to take it sight unseen. It was strange having to fill out an application after owning a home for 5 years (Current landlord?), but it was mostly just a formality. We were accepted by the end of the day.

Then came the onerous task of deciding what to bring with us and what to put in storage. Josh arranged for 3 storage pods to be delivered to our house on Jan 28, and I hired movers to come on the 30th to load the pods and then come back on Feb 2 to move the rest of our stuff to the apartment. (I figured trying to move on Super Bowl Sunday was a bad idea.) The storage company would also retrieve their pods on Feb 2 and take them to a climate-controlled warehouse out in the suburbs. That gave us the weekend to stash any remaining storage items in the pods before we moved.

The next task: boxes. These came from several sources, including Safeway, liquor stores, and Craigslist. Why pay for boxes when you can drive all over town picking them up for free? By the time the pods arrived, we could have built a well-fortified castle out of all the stuff we had boxed up for storage (mostly books).
The only drawback was that the pods filled up our driveway for 3 days, so we had to park around the corner. Oh yeah, and we had several inches of snow and ice on the ground...