Introduction
Moving is always a pain, and usually an expensive pain. The cheapest and most inconvenient way to move is to do everything yourself: rent a huge truck, load everything into it yourself, drive it to the new location yourself (potentially asking someone to drive your own car up), and unload it yourself once you're there. If you've never packed furniture on your own before, you risk the loss of goods, and if you've never driven a large truck before, you may be risking more than that on the road. Special features like "air-ride" suspension or environmental controls may or may not be available. On the far opposite side of the spectrum, you can pay a reputable company to pack, load, drive, and unload everything for you (paying a company you know nothing about to take everything you own is not recommended). The better companies will advertise air-ride trucks with mildew protection at the very least, and will have their own collection of furniture pads, tie-downs, and bubble-wrap necessary to keep everything protected. The downside is that you will have to schedule your move with the mover between two weeks and a month in advance, and it's very expensive. On my last move, from California to Louisiana, I went this route with Mayflower, moving a 1-bedroom apartment for about $3,500, and everything arrived in perfect condition.
In between, there are companies like ABF U-Pack or P.O.D.S. that will provide you with storage containers and will transport them to your final destination, but you will have to load and unload them yourself. This is (in theory) substantially less expensive than using a full-service mover, and not even as difficult to load as a general truck rental, as the storage containers sit on the ground. You also don't have to schedule dropoff more than a couple days in advance, making it a little more flexible for people with a somewhat shaky schedule. Unfortunately, since you are loading yourself, there is practically no insurance on the results. The contracts will pay a tiny $0.10 per pound if the driver gets into an accident that destroys your belongings or simply completely disappears with them, but otherwise they aren't responsible for any damage during shipping at all. In theory, however, for the amount of money you save, you can replace a few breakable items if they don't make it to the other side.
So when I recently moved from Louisiana to Maryland, I went with ABF U-Pack, renting two 6'D x 7'W x 8'H ReloCubes for about $1,600. U-Pack gives you two business days after dropping off the cubes to load them, which means that if you have them dropped off on a Thursday or a Friday, you also get the weekend as extra free time in case something goes wrong. This is highly recommended. Always happy to have a little extra wiggle room, I arranged for the cubes to be dropped off on Thursday, and was told that they would show up in the morning, and my timeline was for an acquaintance to pick up one piece of furniture on Wednesday, I would load everything in the apartment that Thursday and rent a van or small moving truck to start fetching and loading all of the things I needed to move out of a nearby storage facility. On Friday, I'd finish off whatever little things remained and arrange for a cleaning service to come in and take care of everything in a mostly empty apartment. I'd spend the night with a friend, and start driving to Maryland after a refreshing sleep.
Don't try this at home, kids
Things began to go wrong almost immediately. A 15-minute errand to terminate my Cox Communications cable modem service on Wednesday (total actual work required: sign one piece of paper and hand in an already boxed cable modem) resulted in an hour and a half wait as I was shuffled from one building to another and nobody could find anyone who knew where the form was or who had the authority to accept my dropoff. This caused me to miss my scheduled meeting with the acquaintance, who was asking a friend with a pickup truck to help, and couldn't wait. This was frustrating, but not fatal — I could just deliver it myself on Friday when I had the U-Haul. I then went shopping. Tie-downs and bungee cords, it turns out, aren't cheap, and you'll need quite a few of them of different sizes before you're done (I didn't buy all of them at once, not knowing exactly what I'd need, but by the time I was done, I used two 6-foot, four 8-foot, two 10-foot, and two 10-foot-extra-wide tie-downs and a handful of bungee cords). Between that and the bubble wrap and a dolly if you don't already own one, expect to add a few hundred dollars to your bill immediately. I didn't buy furniture pads, figuring that the bubble wrap and various bits of unpacked fabric (sleeping bags, towels, blankets, etc.) would be sufficient. That turned out to be an error resulting in a few extra scratches on the finish of some of the furniture, but those pads are expensive (another $100-150 for a dozen), so I'm not sure how much of an error it was.
On Thursday morning I got a call from the U-Pack people that delivery wouldn't be until around noon. I called back around 1pm to find out what the status was, and nobody knew where the driver was but they presumed he was on his way. I decided not to call the cleaning service, as I was no longer sure that I would have enough stuff out of the way in time. The cubes finally showed up on the truck at about 4:30pm, and it was after five by the time they were on the ground and ready to load. I loaded most of the boxes and some of the smaller bits of furniture that night.
On Friday, I continued loading, and found out three more things: sometimes it can be hard to get even a U-Haul van on short notice (though I eventually succeeded on my third visit, half an hour drive away), even the smallest rental cargo van is large enough to be hideous to drive, and loading by yourself in hot weather can wear you out very quickly and induce you to make poor decisions. One of those decisions was to load with sandals to try to stay a little cooler. I was very careful about not putting my feet where I might drop something on them, but that turned out not to be the real problem: although the ReloCubes sit on the ground, the interior is a few cm elevated and there are thin bits of deceptively dangerous metal used for the door connections just above the ground. While maneuvering a heavy bit of furniture up that slight rise, it started to slide on the dolly. I jumped sideways to get into a position to stabilize it and caught it just fine — but my right big toe also caught a metal protrusion, and lost a sizeable chunk of flesh. The truism of moving being a pain had just become a literal fact. I got it cleaned up and bandaged and took an hour off, but I had a deadline (at a minimum, everything from the storage center had to be moved before the van had to be returned the next day), so once the throbbing had receded to a tolerable level and I put shoes on, I went back to work. Unfortunately, it was necessarily much slower work now, with frequent rests and occasional bandage changes.
To shorten what is already a long tale of woe, I will skip the remainder of the packing process, except to note that I did at least succeed in getting the U-Haul van back on time with everything transported properly, and that I used every bit of extra time from having the weekend. I wrapped up after midnight on Sunday, and at that didn't do quite as good a job of cleaning the apartment as I would have liked. I still haven't found out how much of the deposit I lost from that.
Arrival
Two solid days of driving in my relatively maneuverable little car told me that I was wise not to attempt to drive a big truck myself — there were many drivers behaving rather strangely and I narrowly avoided an accident three times. The house on the far side was semi-furnished, so waiting a couple weeks for delivery was not a problem. I did find out that the cubes weren't picked up on Monday as scheduled, but on Tuesday instead, and I have subsequently discovered from hunting about on the net that this is a common issue with U-Pack -- dropoffs are on the scheduled day (if not at a promised time), but pickups are often a day or even several days late. This wasn't a problem for me, but may be inconvenient for others.
I managed to schedule delivery on a Thursday again, though no time was promised (and I didn't bother to ask). The cubes were dropped off in front of my house and I started inspecting the contents. The good news was that the tie-downs had worked; very little shifting of contents had occurred. The bad news was that some of the furniture was scratched where the item above it had slid slightly and I hadn't had any padding left, and four pieces were out and out destroyed, at an estimated replacement cost of $700-800. It turns out that those cubes travel on a standard flatbed trailer, without any such niceties as air-ride suspension, and as a result, it is more or less as if they rode on the back of a gigantic jackhammer the entire way. I had tightly strapped a halogen lamp to the wall of one, wrapping the glass head to an absurd thickness of bubble wrap, and to my great pleasure the bubble wrap had worked quite well, protecting the glass perfectly.
The plastic neck piece, on the other hand, not in contact with anything at all, had shattered just under the pressure of the bungee cords and the very slight extra width of the top after it was wrapped.
I could have saved it by completely dismantling the top and putting it in a box instead, but it seemed quite secure where it was and I was using that lamp to pack right up to the end; it was one of the last things placed in the cube.
Disheartened, I emptied out that cube and was pleased to find no more significant destruction. The fragile ancient wooden rocking chair had come through okay, and the rest of the furniture escaped with nothing more than minor scratches. In better spirits I opened up the second cube and started unloading. To my horror, I could immediately see that the glass center of my prized marble and wrought iron coffee table had completely fallen. I had wrapped that coffee table with a certain sense of paranoia, the glass center and the legs individually wrapped in bubble wrap, and then the entire thing placed under a larger table so that nothing would be on top of it, and then that table's legs wrapped, and then covered with a quilt, but still only blind luck saved me from destruction. The glass center had apparently been jostled up and sideways enough that it had fallen through the hole completely, and only by sheer luck had been caught on one side by the tail end of the quilt that I had tucked underneath one side, and caught on the other side by the top edge of the bubble wrap intended to protect the legs, where it apparently remained suspended for the rest of the trip.
The most fragile piece in that container having survived, I felt that the sturdier objects must surely have as well. This unfortunately turned out not to be the case. I had stacked two bookshelves horizontally back to back on top of the computer table above the coffee table, and then tossed some lightweight items (camera bags, very small boxes) inside the top bookshelf. I had forgotten that the bookshelves, while primarily made of sturdy wood, had backs made only of what was effectively extra-dense cardboard, and while they held the weight of the small items just fine as I tossed them in there, during the jackhammer of transport they ripped straight through both backs, tearing them free of the nails holding them in place. The bookshelves also managed to rotate very slightly and shift a couple of inches during transport, not enough to actually collide with anything, but enough to move half of one edge of the bottom one off of the side piece of the desk below it and onto the main top piece of that desk. An impact during travel shattered the wood around one of the bolts holding the top of that desk to its side. After some inspection, I judged none of it repairable. I might have saved the bookshelves by placing them vertically in the other container, and swapping out boxes to the one with the tables, but such things look more logical only in hindsight, and probably nothing could have saved the computer table. I needed the space above it, it could not be moved on its side, and any significant weight on the top would probably have had the same result.
The rest of the unloading was anticlimactic. One of the boxes of books had acquired enough condensation at one point to drip through an only partially taped top and damage a couple of the books at the top of the stack, but they remained readable and otherwise all of the fragile boxed items survived. The computer, thankfully, was likewise fine, though it rode the trip out on a folded towel and packed between boxes. The empty containers weren't picked up the next Monday as they were scheduled to, nor for that matter on Tuesday, but letting them sit in front of the house until Wednesday didn't inconvenience me much.
Conclusion
I'm not sure I'd move this way again, given the option to go full service. I saved perhaps $2,000 on the service, but lost over a thousand of that in destroyed possessions, moving materials, and added four days of unpleasant personal labor plus an injury. An experienced mover might do better (and in fact, I'd likely do much better if I had to do it again, especially considering that I've already invested in some of the moving supplies), but moving is an unpleasant enough chore without adding this stress to it. If I didn't have to move all on my own, I might consider it again, but this is definitely not a service for the inexperienced or the solo mover.
