Growing up, the only time my parents moved was when I was at most a year old from their condo to the house they’ve lived in for the past 23 years of my life. There was no moving around for us, so I’ve never been an experienced or savvy mover. It wasn’t until I moved to South Carolina when I was in the Air Force that I really found out how much I hate packing and moving things. We became situated in our first house on base just fine, thanks to long distance movers who picked up our stuff from our homes to have it shipped to our first duty station. Unpacking was actually fairly exciting, even though we had few places to put anything since we had virtually NO furniture.

Our next move was within the year to a house off base, where we had help from friends and making several trips back & forth with our compact sedan. I don’t think it was as bad as it could’ve been since we still had only a couple of couches and a bed. No actual bedroom furniture yet.

Afterwards, once we were discharged from the Air Force, we made our move back to California and the military provided us without our needing to get moving estimates. We’re still trying to get our stuff out of storage now that we’ve finally moved to San Diego. Unfortunately, I think we’ll end up moving again by Spring time since we want to move somewhere cheaper, so depending on whether we have our furniture or not, we might need to shop around for local movers and obtaining local moving quotes if we can’t handle everything on our own and a rental truck.

I don’t enjoy packing at all, but I know unpacking is pretty satisfying – but only if there’s a place to actually put things. It’s no fun having a majority of your stuff just sprawled out over the floors or in boxes.