Not Hiring Movers Was A Mistake

“Hiring movers was the best money I’ve ever spent,” fellow domesticated dads told me for weeks as I planned to move my wife, son, cats, cars, and junk across town by myself. “Don’t bother, just spend the money!” they exclaimed. My wife, too, suggested we forego the hassle and just rip off the bandaid. But nobody should underestimate just how cheap of a man I am, and just how much punishment I’ll put myself through to save a buck. It’s in my blood.

Quite a few of my traits are a byproduct of having grown up on or near military bases in a household of six boys, an army dad, and a German stay-at-home mom. Two of the most enduring of those traits are 1. My frugality and 2. My refusal to ever complain.

The second one is actually more than just a “refusal to ever complain,” it’s a sense of pride when I’m able to endure a physical hardship. I enjoy a challenge just for the sake of a challenge, even if — perhaps especially if — it really, really sucks. I don’t know if this is just me trying to make up for the fact that I’m a blogger and not an army soldier like my dad and many of my childhood friends, or if it’s just a byproduct of having grown up around other military kids and brothers who all challenged one another to be tough. It’s also likely that any thoughts I have about complaining are quickly quenched by the context of actual hardships that many of the military families that I grew up around faced.

I won’t psychoanalyze myself further, but you get the idea: I like doing difficult things, even if they’re sometimes pointless. For example, I look back fondly at the time I slept in an ice-cold diesel manual minivan and bathed in the Baltic Sea. I didn’t love getting trenchfoot while living out of a Land Cruiser and fixing a rusty, mouse-infested Willys FC-170, but you can’t tell me that wasn’t awesome. The time I drove 1,000 miles in a rusted-out 1948 Willys before breaking down in the middle of nowhere, Kansas was a swell time. All the times I had to weld on my back in the snow in freezing weather to fix giant rust holes in my Jeep’s unibody-rails — they were extremely cool. Horrible, but cool.

And so, maybe, as I bask in the sunny rays of California, and blog on my MacBook, I saw this move  — which I would have to do solo, as my wife is looking after baby-Delmar and my local friend-group is, uh, diminutive — as just another tiny chapter in my never ending quest to push myself, even a tiny bit. It’s not efficient, and it’s going to suck a little, but that’s the point.

Combine my suck-it-up-itude with my disdain for paying people to do things I can do myself, and there was no other option. Moving all of my wife’s and my stuff would have probably cost $1200, and I can rent a U-Haul trailer for $30 a day. I didn’t go for any of the box-trucks, because even though they’re bigger and only cost $30 or so a day, U-Haul charges a per-mile fee, and you know I’m not payin’ that, especially since I recently(ish) purchased a 1989 Chevy K1500 with a 350 small-block V8 under the hood.

And not only that, while researching which fluid to put in my rear diff (forums have not come to a consensus to know exactly which type is correct; it’s really strange), I learned that my K1500 isn’t just any ordinary K1500. This thing was built to tow. Check out the axle in the rear — it’s a 14-bolt semi-float axle, an absolute monster:

It’s a five-speed, 350 V8, 14-bolt K1500, and the rear trailer hitch has actually been welded to the frame!:

Clearly, I’m well equipped to move all of our stuff over a weekend for a paltry 60 bucks plus insurance and tax and gas. That’s a savings of over $1,400! Who could turn that down? Not I. And so I somehow convinced my wife this was the avenue we were going down, and let me tell you folks: We definitely put our marriage through the equivalent of SAE J2807. And what’s worse is, I’ve run the numbers, and honestly: This really didn’t save us that much cash.

First things first: What we were dealing with was a 1,500 square foot two-bedroom Townhouse occupied by two adults with 70 years worth of combined junk. The two cats have also accumulated some things in the past two years in the form of toys and treats, while baby-Delmar has accumulated a bunch of baby stuff that has seemingly come from nowhere in insane volumes. What the hell is a keekaroo? Do we really need a dedicated diaper bin? How did we get so many clothes; does he need all this?

 

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Anyway, complicating things is the fact that my baby boy is six weeks old, and as such is extremely demanding. Actually, if you Google it, you’ll see that six to eight weeks is “peak fussiness” for babies, and I won’t lie: It’s a nightmare.

For those of you who haven’t procreated, I think the best analogy I can give you is a slipping transmission. Sometimes, if the temperature outside is just right, and you’re on just the right stretch of road, maybe it won’t slip and you’ll cruise along smoothly. Maybe you can shove a bottle of Lucas Transmission Fix down your transmission’s dipstick hole, maybe you can pacify it by jammimg the vehicle into the right gear, maybe if you plumb in an external cooler and keep from leaning too hard on the gas you’ll get down the road without an issue.

But in the end you’re screwed. Utterly, thoroughly screwed. Because your stopgap fixes — the temperature optimization, the bottle, the gear shift lever-pacifier, the dance you do with your right pedal — they’re not going save you from what happens at the worst time: A total meltdown. And I’m talkin’: Stuck in traffic in 100 degree weather, going uphill, and your vehicle is just going apeshit, the motor is screaming, it’s shuttering like mad, there’s all sorts of fluid just pouring all over the place for some reason, and you’re just praying, praying to god that somehow your child will calm the ef down because it’s 3AM and you’re so tired you can’t even continue with this transmission analogy.

So anyway, back to this move. Packing was rough, as baby-Delmar required my wife Elise’s attention quite often, meaning I had to basically pack an entire household alone, save for certain larger, more cumbersome items (but not heavy ones, as she can’t lift much at the moment). Speaking of, I cannot believe how horrible it is to move a king size mattress. I mean horrible. I wasn’t expecting it to be that hard; after all, I’ve successfully moved 500+ pound engines around the country without any issue — check it out:

But a mattress, while lighter than an engine, is much, much worse to transport and for one reason: It’s got basically zero structural rigidity. It is a seven-foot-tall, six-foot-wide 180 pound wet noodle, and trying to get it down stairs out into the U-Haul trailer was impossible. It couldn’t be done. I started to look into hiring an extra set of hands, buying a special bag with handles, or just leaving the mattress for future-me to deal with next week.

But then I came up with this little contraption:

Basically, I used pieces of the bedframe, along with some ratchet straps, to create a rib right down the center of the mattress to give it some rigidity. This would allow me to stand it upright on some dollies I had purchased, and then — with Elise’s help — wheel the behemoth to my dirt-cheap trailer.

The heaviest thing I had to move was this dresser, which must be made of solid oak, because it weighs roughly 300 pounds:

I personally have never bought furniture of such high quality, andI have no desire to after having to move that whole dresser down the stairs by myself (I slid it upside down along a moving blanket), and then rolling it to the truck and lifting it up into the bed, one side at a time:

But it wasn’t just moving heavy things that made this relocation such a pain, it was the boxing of all of our stuff, it was the disassembly of all the furniture, and it was the procurement of all the ancillary moving things, many of which I didn’t initially realize I needed. It all adds up.

The trailer came in at $82 for the two days, the four dollies I had to buy to move the furniture were $130, the moving blankets added up to $40, the gas for the three trips in our two vehicles (assuming 8 MPG in the truck and 20 in her RX350 and current $5/gallon gas price) got us to about $180, the tape was probably $20, the stuff I broke (some glasses — see below) was maybe another $50, and the minor damage I did to the Townhouse trying to drag huge things by myself was maybe $100 or $200. Add that all up and I ended up at about $600 to $700. And it would have been more if I had to buy new boxes (Elise sourced those for free).

That means I saved us a paltry $600 doing this move alone (I can sell some things to increase that figure, to be sure). And yes, I — a cheapo — realize that $600 is nothing to scoff at, but realize that I traded probably 24 hours for $600. That’s $25 an hour, and it would have been a lot less than $25 I had hurt myself or done more damage to the house or our stuff. And then there’s the priceless stuff like attention I could have given my child during that time or the avoidance of Elise’s wrath for me having wasted all that time by being cheap, and yeah, on paper — because I’m lucky enough to have the means — this definitely was the wrong move.

And yet, I kind of enjoyed it, not just because of the exercise and the problem solving and the wrenching, but because it meant I could put my new K1500 to work, and it was phenomenal. That 350 cubic-inch V8 makes gobs of torque, and the 3.73 gearing in those axles worked superbly with the manual transmission to haul that 3,500 pound trailer right up the steep, hot Sepulveda Pass:

I averaged about 55 mph most of the way, and the truck felt stable and reasonably responsive. Downshifting assisted the brakes in slowing the truck down, and gave me enough torque to pull up steep grades. The ride was great, and even though my extended-cab truck only has a 6.5-foot bed, I actually don’t mind giving up some bed length for extra space in the cab to put items I don’t want to get dusty on the freeway.

This GMT400 truck has blown me away ever since I bought it for $4,900. It’s quiet, smooth, powerful, and extremely capable, plus it doesn’t have a spec of rust on it, and it’s so anonymous and ubiquitous that I can use it as a genuine beater without worry about having to replace some unobtainium part.

What a great machine — a true joy that made all these aches in my arms and back disappear from my mind as I smiled from ear to ear while rowing through those five gears. All that blabbering at the beginning of this article about me liking a challenge was true, but this right here — seeing this old truck do its thing — that was the real point of all this. And it was absolutely worth it.