After several busy weeks of packing and preparing to move from our peninsula home to Seattle, the day finally arrived: we moved out of our house. Saying goodbye was difficult, but we’re approaching this change as the start of a new chapter rather than a final farewell. Every home we’ve lived in remains part of our story and our fond memories.
(Update: I later wrote a two-part series with my top tips for preparing to buy a new house and planning a move.)
This house will always be special to us. I learned so much here about creating a home I love and finding contentment wherever I am. I’ll continue sharing lessons, favorite rooms and projects from this house on the blog. It’s also the home featured in my book The Inspired Room, due out in November — I’m excited for you to see it and hold it in your hands. The book includes my decorating process, tips for designing a home, and many photos from this house.
Although we’ve physically left this house, it feels more like “see you later” than goodbye.
Moving out without having another house closed before the sale presented some logistical challenges. We’d always moved straight from one home to another, which keeps things straightforward: belongings go from Home A to Home B. This time we had to find a solution for being between homes.
- I worried about renting a storage unit: would we need multiple units to store an entire house? How would we move everything into storage? Would it mean moving twice in a short time?
- Renting a temporary house was expensive, especially in Seattle, and we didn’t want a long-term commitment with dogs.
- At one point I even considered selling most of our furniture to the new owner and taking only what would fit in backpacks — tempting, but impractical.
With a week to vacate the house, the pressure was on. After some anxious searching I found the answer: PODS. Their portable storage containers could be delivered to our driveway, loaded at our pace, and then stored securely until we were ready for delivery to our new place. I called and explained our tight timeline; the representative reassured me PODS could manage the details. That relief was immediate.
PODS offers containers in different sizes and provides an online space calculator to estimate how many you’ll need based on your home’s size. Containers are delivered by truck and can sit in your driveway or curbside. You can hire help to load them or do it yourself. Since we’d already packed most things in the weeks leading up to moving day, we handled a fair amount of the loading ourselves.
We also rented plastic moving bins from a local company, which made packing easier. The bins came in various sizes and included labels, which helped keep items organized during the move.
See more moving tips in my two-part post on planning a move.
Years ago my husband and I decided we wouldn’t move heavy furniture ourselves after some unlucky incidents in past relocations. So once PODS was lined up, they recommended Hire-A-Helper to find local moving labor. We booked a team from Washington Moving Labor Services to handle the heavy lifting on moving day.
Hiring help was the best decision. While the crew worked hard and efficiently in the heat, I took a moment to relax and let them manage the strenuous tasks. By the end of that day most of the house was loaded into the containers. I’ll share more about the small disasters that happened on our final day — I even ended up with a few moving bruises to show for it — in a future post.
The next day the containers were taken to PODS’ secure storage facility. That meant we didn’t have to move twice: PODS would store the containers and deliver them to our new home when we were ready. This approach made the entire transition far smoother than other options we’d considered.
At the moment I’m writing this we’re temporarily staying with family while awaiting our next home. Though technically between places, we’re optimistic: we found a house and have an accepted offer, and we expect to close soon. I’ll share details about that in an upcoming post.
I’ll write more about our last day in the house — the mistakes, the lessons, and the tips that helped make this move successful. For now, I’d love to hear your moving stories: have you had any tricky experiences?
Many thanks to PODS for partnering with us during this move and helping make the process much less stressful.