Finally Moved In!

Fall Leaves, originally uploaded by Patch_Adams.

I’ve been quite remiss in blogging lately but I’ve been consumed by the move. I spent over a month slowly packing up the house and then had a mad dash the last two days to pack the remaining items (ie the kitchen and our clothes) up. Last Saturday was moving day and we had planned on having a moving truck, my father’s trailer, and my father to assist. What happened was that we woke up to cloudy and drizzling skies and my father calling to say he was running late. Hours late in fact, and he didn’t bring the trailer. We picked up our rental truck and started to load. It’s amazing how many boxes you don’t realize you have until you have to haul them out to a truck. We managed to get most of the boxes in the truck before our $20 an hour movers arrived to help with the heavy stuff. They cost us $90 total and were well worth it but the pace definitely slowed down after they arrived. My father finally arrived with his brother and the hand trucks. We managed to fill the entire moving truck up in 5 hours. The drive between our old house and our new apartment takes about two hours and it took another two hours to unload everything. We simply dumped stuff where it would fit and decided to sort it out later. We only had the rental truck for the day to Sunday we had to use our vehicles to haul the rest of our stuff to the new apartment. It took us two trips with two small SUVs and we still have stuff in the house! I plan on getting it out before doing our final walk through Thursday.

The past two days have been spent setting up the bedroom and kitchen. Everything else will slowly be sorted out over the next couple weeks. I don’t feel settled in yet but at least we have the move itself behind us. We will definitely have to downsize to fit into this apartment but I’m okay with that. Mostly because I know we will have to move again and I want to have as little stuff as possible!

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Inconvenient Conveniences

Luna Moth, originally uploaded by gregp25.

Sorry the post has nothing to do with the picture but I can’t have a pictureless post so I just picked one I liked.

We are getting closer to moving day and have managed to sort through 75% of the basement which is actually a huge accomplishment since there were boxes down there that my husband has been carting around unopened for about 10 years. I may be a packrat but my dear husband is a hoarder! We are both getting better about letting go and hope to actually be able to fit into our 800 sq ft apartment by the time moving day (10 October) rolls around. I’ll be honest, that goal is a bit optimistic, but we will have an attached garage to catch the spill over.

Packing aside I’ve been trying to cancel all our utilities at our current house and start utilities at the new apartment. I thought that Comcast (our cable, internet, and phone provider) would be the easiest seeing as how they advertise the ability to “transfer your services to your new address.” This is supposed to mean keeping your current equipment and I would think save you a new set up fee. But none of that is actually true. What they really mean when they say “transfer” is that you call and cancel your service at your current location and that person will forward your call to the new service area where you go through the entire process of starting service (including the associated fees) again. Is it just me or is this not the definition of “transfer”?

The upshot is the savings we will reap from cancelling our cable entirely. Right now we pay $145.00 a month for internet, phone, and cable. When we move and eliminate the cable our monthly bill will only be $42.00 and my work (which pays for me to have a home office) will reimburse me that bill each month and reimburse me the $128.00 “set up fee.” This fee is communist! The house is already wired for cable! This set up fee is simply covering home delivery of the new modem and them confirming the line is active. The whole process will probably take about 15-20 minutes. If I had opted to include cable this setup fee would have been cut in half. That’s right adding a service to “set up” would actually save me money. This is just one of the many ways the cable companies screw you…

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Cutting the Cable Cord

untitled, originally uploaded by randi bee.

I’ve mentioned before that my husband and I are moving and we are moving ourselves. This is not a fun prospect and the reason for my utter lack of posting lately. The sewing machine and my entire stash has already been boxed up although we won’t move until the 10th of October. Since we are moving ourselves and we both work so much I’ve been slowly packing up our house. It gives me a sense of accomplishment and prevents me from thinking about the fact that we still have to load all this stuff up and then unpack it again…

Besides a new job (which is the driving reason for moving) we are also trying to cut down on our expenses and moving allows us to shave a couple hundred dollars a month off of our rent. We have also decided after much discussion to cancel our cable service. If you know us you will be shocked and probably doubtful that we will see this through. Don’t worry we haven’t been abducted and brain washed. In preparation for cutting the cord we’ve purchased a box to stream Netflix movies instantly to our TV ($180.00), an antenna to catch the HD signals from the local and free stations ($34.00) and a small converter box to use that antenna on our Mac ( $129.00). So far this isn’t saving us much money… the total cost is $343.00. Since cable costs us roughly $80 a month it’s going to take us over four months to break even and five to start seeing a real savings. To offset this we’ve decided to sell our small flat screen TV for $100 (we will be using our Mac in it’s place) and our DVD player for $20 (this is being replaced with the streaming Blue Ray player). If we succeed in selling them for our asking price cutting the cable will only cost us $223…. Looking at it this way is depressing so instead I prefer to think about the fact that in a year we will have saved $737.

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