By Kara Wahlgren, FrontDoor.com | Published: 1/28/2008
If you've planned everything perfectly, you'll spend the last night in your old home with a few sleeping bags, some toiletries, and a snack or two. That was the game plan when my husband and I recently relocated. We had a slight overlap between our move-in and move-out days, which meant the bulk of our stuff had already been loaded onto a rental truck the previous weekend and was awaiting us in our new house. We stayed behind for closing with a smattering of bare essentials.
Or so we thought. As it turned out, our cars strongly disagreed with our definition of a "smattering." What seemed small in the context of a three-bedroom house suddenly looked downright enormous in the trunk of a Ford Escort and a Volkswagen GTI. We organized and re-organized, and when that didn't work, we resorted to shoving until every last air pocket in the cars had been filled. Then we started strapping things to the roof. Everything made it safely to our new home, but only thanks to my husband's impressive stash of bungee cords.
In retrospect, we should have gathered all the odds and ends into one room to get a realistic idea of how much space we needed. It's hard to judge when your weed whacker is in the garage, your pillows are in the bedroom, and your lamps are in the dining room. Once you know how much cargo you have, tack on at least 10 percent -- because you don't know what you've got 'til you move it.
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