Moving! UPack Relocube / PODS

Wednesday, October 28, 2015

After a decent chunk of price-checking and tow-load-limit-researching, we determined that the most affordable means of getting a <2 year old car, and our personal possessions across the country was to drive the car and ship the stuff separately. The UPack Relocube was cheaper and rather similar to the moving PODS you see everywhere. It still set us back $1,900+, but rates were rather similar across companies. Shipping just the car alone would have been at least $1700. So, it is what it is.

It was nice to be able to track the cube online, although it would've been even nicer if we'd been given a little more accurate head's up as to its arrival date. The company insists on delivering within 48 hours of its arrival, but cannot provide a super accurate arrival estimate. So, if you don't have a private driveway, a bit of last minute scrambling is unavoidable.

We packed the cube in Pittsburgh with just J and his nephew. Having experienced that, we tried to hire movers on the California side, but just unloading boxes (no furniture!) from our 6'w X 7'd X 8'h cube had an estimate of 3 men's efforts for 3 hours, for $400. So J unpacked us entirely in California. One man, three hours. We rented a hand truck from Home Depot tool rental to make the long walk from the guest parking spots to our apartment a little more bearable. But there was no way around hauling all that stuff up a flight of stairs. We did it, but were completely beat.

There aren't any great photos of our full UPack Relocube, but it was pretty stuffed. Could we have fit the microwave and vacuum in there if the Pittsburgh UPack guy hadn't been so prompt? Yeah, sure. But not the bicycles. There was no way around strapping them to the back of the car.
We were a bit needlessly worried about water leakage, and covered the whole pile in some cheap visqueen...but there wasn't a drop of water in there by the end. Solid cube construction.