Here's a bit about our plans so far:
Prepping to Move
As soon as we found out that Ken would be taking a job back in Ontario, we started to think about what we could sell. So far, I have sold 18 items (mostly smaller furniture items like desks, chairs, dressers, cabinets, small tables, etc.) and have more listed! The goal is to have less 'stuff' to take up room on the truck, thereby lessening the work and the cost of moving such a long distance.
As I begin to pack boxes, I'm hoping to find more items that we can pass on, in order to take less 'little stuff' with us as well. (It's much more difficult to decide to part with things when there's nothing wrong with your items... having the smoke smell to deal with sure made it easier to purge!... but I'm not sure I'd recommend that approach ;)
Now that we know how much time we're working with, we'll put a plan into place for what parts of the house to have packed by what dates- it's an overwhelming thought, but I've gotten started by packing a couple of boxes each day and have a small pile of taped & labeled boxes developing in the corner of my office... one
Getting Our Things from Utah to Canada
Similar to what we did last time, we'll be loading our belongings into a truck (which we will pay for by the foot) and the company (U-Pack) will be driving it as close to our new home as it can get, without going into Canada. I'm so glad we won't need to drive a moving truck all the way! Once our things arrive in Detroit, we will rent a moving truck in Canada, drive it across the border, move our items from the 1st truck to the 2nd, and then drive it across the border to our new home in Canada.
The catch is that at this point in time, we have no home... and we're not sure if we will have one to move our things into. If that's the case, we'll have to load it into a storage unit until we do have a home (at which point we'll have to rent another moving truck to get everything from the storage unit to our new home)... so that sounds... stressful. ;)
Traveling To Canada
As far as getting ourselves back to Canada, we'll be driving our family back in our car. That's a fairly long car ride, so we're going to make a fun trip out of it by stopping at some fun places along the way.
Our plan right now is to visit:
St. George, Utah
Las Vegas, Nevada
Grand Canyon in Arizona
Ken's cousin's family in Texas
...then take a nice long drive the rest of the way up to Canada
I'm looking forward to this part because I'm thinking of it as a little vacation between the two stressful parts of moving out of here, and into there. ;)
Finding A Home
Finding a home has proven tricky because we aren't able to look at a place in person and because the city we're moving to seems to have a tricky rental market (things I'm finding online seem to either be fairly run down & in rough neighborhoods or nice but quite expensive... I'm really hoping we can find ourselves something in the middle!)
Long term, we hope that things work out great with Ken's new job and that we can actually settle down, but we'd like to become more familiar with the area and sure about the job before we jump into buying a home, so we're on the hunt for a good rental. We hope that buying a home may be in our not-too-distant future!
Also, searching online for a rental home has been a roller coaster of emotions for me. I get worried with the prospects I've seen listed so far, then I'll find some that look really nice, get in touch with the owner by email, and find that he or she claims to be presently in Nigeria and unable to show the property until we have paid the rent at which point we can have the keys... uh huh. That happened twice- 2 different stories. So, it's discouraging but I'm trying to have faith that things will work out for us!
What If We Arrive Homeless?
Arriving in Canada without a home to go to is actually pretty likely. We may have to stay with one of our parents for a little while in order to nail down a home- which will be interesting since they live 3 hours away from our new city. It will be an adventure! We hope things will fall into place quickly so that we won't be "homeless" for long!
I hope to keep you posted on our moving progress here on the blog as things continue. I've also thought about doing some vlogging about the process but I haven't made a final decision on that, so we'll see if I decide to go ahead with that or stick to regular blog posts!
That’s so great that you are making it into a road trip! Glad you have parents to stay with until you find a place
ReplyDeleteHopefully that will make it really fun! :)
DeleteIt's pretty crazy to have no plan for where we'll live! :/
It must be hard house hunting from another city and country!
ReplyDeleteIt has been really difficult... hopefully things will become clearer when we get there!
Deleteoh wow so much to do!! Is it harder moving back to Canada or moving from Canada to USA?
ReplyDeleteHmmm... good question! Both were hard, & I guess we'll see how moving back goes... not knowing where we'll move to is making this part pretty stressful though!
DeleteAwesоme artіcle.
ReplyDelete