GA to DC: Getting Ready to Move!

Hello! I’m sure you’ve all missed me, but I forgot how much work a PCS entails. Especially when you actually have stuff and own a house.

We spent the week or so before we left Georgia fixing up all the little things in our house that needed repair, throwing out stuff that wasn’t coming with us, and replacing the hardwood floor in our house with ceramic tile that looks like hardwood – I saw it on Pinterest a while ago and thought it looked awesome, so when I saw it in the flooring store, I was all over it. But a word of advice? You don’t want people in the house ripping up your floors the day you’re trying to clean everything and leave. Also, I don’t care how much money it saves to do it yourself: let someone else clean your carpets.

My brother and sister flew in two days before we left and they were a huge help with cleaning and organizing everything to get ready for moving.

As for the movers? Well… that was an unpleasant experience.

They sent two packers the first day to pack up our five bedroom house. We had more than that to pack up our two bedroom apartment in Monterey. But they seemed to do a good — albeit very slow — job.

And then the people came two days later to pick up the shipment and asked why our bed was still assembled. Hmm? Apparently, the first people who came to pack everything were supposed to disassemble and wrap everything that needed disassembling. And since that was supposed to already be done, the second crew didn’t have any tools. So they left and came back two hours later. And then they realized that their dolly had a flat tire and that the lift on their truck didn’t work. Sigh.

At some point, the operations manager came by to check out the situation and we learned that we were supposed to have a lot more movers, but only two of them showed up at work for the day. And we also learned that the girl making the inventory of our furniture was marking everything as scratched or dented even when it wasn’t. Worst part about that? She was a milspouse – and not just any milspouse, she was a Navy sub wife. Nice.

Anyway, The ops manager made her start completely over and we assured him that we fully intended to inspect everything ourselves before we signed off on the paper. Eventually, they told us they needed to come back a second day – not because they were out of time, but because the truck they had wasn’t big enough for all our stuff. The guy assures us that he will be there around 7 am, and definitely no later than 8.

So at 9 the next morning (yep.) two guys showed up to finish the job, along with the ops manager, who wanted to go over the inventory with me. Within five seconds of looking at the list, we realized how much the girl had screwed it up the day before. Things were missing from the list (she listed our washer, but not dryer; the King bed frame, but not the mattress and so on), things were mislabeled (she skipped a sticker at some point), and she kept listing everything as damaged even after the ops manager told her to stop (she wrote that our GLASS tv stand was gouged – how is that even possible??). I spent the morning correcting her list with the ops manager and finally signed off on everything, but I’m still paranoid that we’re going to end up missing something big.

But finally, they loaded everything and our house was empty. We finished cleaning the next day, packed up and weighed our cars (we did a partial DITY), and finally hit the road at about 3 PM.

Next to come: Driving forever through a thunderstorm and checking into a hotel with no power, exploring Baltimore and Philadelphia, and DC on the Fourth!

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