Yesterday was our big moving day, and eventually we made the decision to splurge a little and pay a company to help. We still did all of the packing (over the last three weeks, and it was crazy), but these guys would show up the day of, load the truck at our old house, and then subsequently unload after I drove the truck over to the new house. We honestly weren’t really sure what to expect and at some points felt a little slackish for not doing the heavy lifting ourselves, but looking back now that it’s all done, I’ll never not pay someone to help us move ever again!
Of course, it didn’t help that I wasn’t able to get a bigger truck – it was either 17’ or 26’, and stupid me opted for the smaller of the two, which was in fact smaller than the truck we had used to move into that house some three years earlier – so I warned the guys right out of the gate that it was probably going to be a tight fit at best. Amusingly enough, their response was a chuckled, “That’s par for the course – we’ll make it fit!” and with that, they went straight to work.
The whole ordeal was like watching an expertly played game of Tetris, and aside from me helping to pack up Sara and her cousin’s cars for them to transport the more fragile and awkwardly-sized items, I pretty much kept to the sidelines and answered questions about prioritizations while they worked. There were times that admittedly I even felt a little guilty because these guys had to do all of the heavy lifting, wrestling with our dresser and TV and countless numbers of boxes, but the truth was there was just no way that Sara and I could’ve done it on our own.
That’s how we did it last time, and although I can’t recall if she actually had back problems before, she most certainly did afterwards. I even had friends that offered to come help, but that’s still an awful lot of work for a couple of non-physical people to handle and we easily would’ve been at it all day. With these guys we were loaded in about 2.5 hours and unloaded in another hour – it was truly amazing.
The (sheepishly) funny thing is, when we first considered hiring people, I did a lot of searching around about tipping and after a healthy debate, I had decided that we were already paying them enough – they didn’t need to get a tip on top of that (their fee was $45/hr for two guys – we had them for 4 hours total). By the time they were ¾’s of the way done loading and the truck was bursting at the seams from floor to ceiling, my opinion had slightly changed on the concept of tipping and I had Sara stop by an ATM for some cash!
When all was said and done, they most definitely earned that tip, and probably even a little more. Sure, it was a good chunk of change for a long afternoon’s work, but not having to wrestle our elliptical up into and then back out of the truck … priceless!