We’ve set our date for the last days we’ll be in this city—somewhere around the 29th of August. That date is coming up soon, and we have a lot to prepare before we leave!
How early do you start packing? We don’t have an entire house full of stuff, but we do have a fair amount, since we have a lot of hobbies.
With a little over 1 month left, now is the time to prepare for the movers and get packing supplies.
A few weeks ago I used this website I found—CanadaMovers.ca to get quotes from different moving companies sent to me. I received almost 10 quotes! I now need to look them over and contact a few to let them know of our exact dates. We’ll need to have 1 month of storage before we meet our stuff in Calgary, and a student discount wouldn’t hurt! Many of the companies offer free storage for a month. When I get some responses, I’ll search for some reviews and feedback on the different companies.
With moving across such a huge distance, we wanted to make sure we had our things securely packaged. Moving boxes can be really expensive, and we didn’t want to use anything that wouldn’t be sturdy enough for the distance. There is a huge difference between moving within a city and moving across the country—especially a huge country like Canada. Boxes of the same size help make the move efficient and keep things more organized, both in the moving truck and when storing items.
We will be moving to my brother’s house in Calgary for a while, so we don’t need to worry about arrangements at the final destination, but we will be going away for several weeks before we get to Calgary.
We found a great company that is all about boxes—
The Great Little Box Company makes custom boxes for hundreds of companies, and also offers moving boxes for local movers and for pick-up. The company seems to treat its employees really well, from what we could see, and they have consistently won awards for top employers in BC and Canada. Obviously, this made us feel even better about purchasing our boxes from them. We bought a bundle of 20 in each of 2 sizes—1.5 quarts, and 2 quarts. The boxes cost about $1.50 and $1.95 each for the 2 sizes. The added-up price may seem steep, but given our reasons for wanting consistent sizes of boxes, it is well worth the price. The individual price of these boxes is actually really great—at least $2 less per box than from moving companies, Mailboxes Etc. or other places. Because the boxes will be the same size(s), they will be easy to store for future use.
Since we won’t be moving the items ourselves, and instead hiring a company to move everything for us, we need to be organized and keep a good record of what is being moved.
Do you have any tips for making a long-distance move? What else should we do to prepare?