The Six-Dollar Toaster Box

We're getting ready to move for the 4th time in our married life. We are still nowhere near the impressive stats posted by my brother and his wife. Since they got married in 1996 they've lived in Alberta, Idaho, California, Colorado, Kansas, Colorado again, and now Idaho again. In all, I think they've moved 17 times or something crazy like that. In the same period, I have myself only moved 10 or 11 times, and that includes my two years in Russia as a missionary, where changing addresses only involved a pair of suitcases.

I remember that you had to be pretty careful about accumulating cargo when you were limited to two pieces of baggage, and weight was also an important consideration. After my first winter, I left my big Sorel boots and my overcoat behind in my apartment because they weren't worth the cargo space they occupied (plus, those boots drew a lot of curious looks).

I quickly found other items to fill that space -- things like ties. I remember buying a tie (quite an ugly one, as I recall) in a second-hand shop. This place had an interesting pricing scheme: they charged by weight. When I brought this fantastically ugly tie up to the counter, the lady put it on a vegetable scale and told me the price. I don't remember what it cost, but a 50-gram tie probably didn't set me back very much. A different store used the bag system. They charged 5 rubles for whatever you could cram into one of their plastic bags. You can fit a lot of ties into a plastic bag.

We used a variation on the bag system when we moved to Ontario from Utah in 2002. The trucking company, ABF U-Pack, showed up with a 28-foot semi trailer (9ft high x 8 ft wide) and they charged us by the foot for the space we used. We did a practice run of stacking our boxes and furniture in the living room to make sure we stacked it high and used every square inch. In the end we got all of our belongings into 7 feet of space (504 cubic feet) for only $1500. That's about $3 per cubic foot.

Unfortunately, Canadian shipping laws do not permit ABF to ship our stuff from Ottawa to Calgary, so we have to find other means. The most obvious choice is to rent a U-Haul truck and drive it ourselves. At $3600 for a 17-foot truck, that sounds pretty good, until you realize that you still need to add on the cost of a car trailer, the taxes, $1000 worth of gas, and 4 days of accommodation and meals to get you through the 3500-km journey (2100 miles). All told, you're looking at $6000. And that's if you drive the truck yourself -- stopping every 3 hours to feed the baby. I think we'd rather cash in our airmiles for a flight, ship the stuff separately, and sell our car.



There are some services other than U-Pack who can save you the trouble of driving. For example, there's a group called PODS who bring a 16-foot storage unit to your house and give you several days to load it. They pick it up and ship it to your new house, giving you up to 30 days of storage in the price. Unfortunately, the price is $6000 when you are talking about houses in Ottawa and Calgary. Not much of a savings there.

Unless I can sort out how to ship our stuff like freight on wooden pallets, probably the best fit for us is U-CAN, which is like PODS, but smaller. They bring a trailer by that has a container on it that is 8x9x8 and you load it up. That one only costs $3500 (comes to $6/ft^3). We can probably fit our stuff in there if we get rid of some of our larger items, like our couch & loveseat. We estimate the couches (which are 20+ years old) are probably worth $100, but we can save $2500 by getting rid of them. The way I see it, if something isn't worth $6 per cubic foot, we need to decide whether it's worth keeping.

How big is a cubic foot, anyways?

I couldn't find a box in our basement that was exactly one foot, but this toaster box was pretty close -- just a bit too short. If we find ourselves filling boxes this size with junk that isn't worth 6 bucks, we'll need to pare down.

You could certainly fit a lot of ties into a toaster box like that.