Moving truck vs freight line

[fitz19d]

Anyone have advice on finding a decent price on an 18 wheeler to deliver all my house and furniture?

Been looking fast and loose ahead of June move to OK. Trying to figure out if i can fit a 26' truck. Though except for gas, 2 16' might be cheaper anyways. One way certainly pricier but not sure if so much so it makes it worth driving an empty truck back 750 miles.

Cost is a bigger factor than personal effort. Wouldn't be so much a provoked but i get nervous without enough $$$ buffer built up and there's certainly going to be some disruption on income between the time of move and getting home rented and working steady there.

[eddiememphis]

Have you looked into pods?

You pack them, they ship them. Then you unload.

[DenverGP]

No idea on the 18 wheeler.

For my move to tx, we went with a 16' PODS, plus a 16' rental truck. PODS cost was a little more than the cost of a one-way 16' truck rental. But most of the PODS cost was for mileage. Was around $200 per month for container rental, $2000 for transport of container from Littleton to Dallas. The rental truck was about $1800, but that included trailer to haul a car as well. I didn't keep track of fuel costs for the drive, but it added up.

One related story:
I originally planned to go thru Budget truck rental, but they didn't have a trailer or car dolly available. I switched over to u-haul, with a pickup location just down to the road from me in Littleton. Pickup was set for 9am on Saturday. At noon Thursday, got a call/email from U-Haul, stating that my pickup location had been changed. It was now in PAONIA. Luckily, when I cancelled my original budget reservation, the regional manager called and emailed to see if he could get me to stay with Budget. I called him up, and within a half hour, he had a truck/trailer set up in arvada. More $$$ than the u-haul, but only a few hundred bucks more. I will NEVER go with u-haul again. (not that I intend to move ever again). U-Hauls managers and customer service people repeatedly mentioned fine print on the website that the location you reserve at is just a preference and they can send you wherever the hell they want if they don't have what you need at your preferred location.


Oh, and I wish I had just ponied up the extra $$$ for the 26' truck vs the 16'.

[fitz19d]

Have you looked into pods?

You pack them, they ship them. Then you unload.

Pricy for what they are, unless you have a fairly minimalist home

[thedave1164]

Buy a box truck that will meet your needs, make the move, then drive it to CA and sell for a profit

[fj605]

How's the price of a POD compare to the price of a truck rental once you account for travel time? 750 miles of travel in one of those trucks has to be the better part of 12hrs.

[Great-Kazoo]

U-Boxes from U-haul. Each hold 2k of weight. They get delivered to your door, then picked up and delivered to the closest, or major uhaul storage facility near you. They store them in climate controlled warehouse, then will load them on to a dolly you can use to unload at your house.

[fitz19d]

Uboxes similiar to pods are pricy for the amount of crap we have though working on that. 6 boxes which is Somewhat similiar to a 26' truck is showing like 3200. Currently 26' for 4 days and 850 miles is 1300 from uhaul, about 700 in gas. 20' is 1k.

So 1k to have a very long day driving is worth saving. Now if we need a 2nd truck it gets ugly quick and basically doing a truck and a half with pods may be worth it vs 2 whole trucks

[Gman]

We went the PODS route. Wood framed U-Boxes from U-Haul give up some internal capacity due to the way they are constructed.

Wasn't cheap, but it worked since we didn't have a home to move into on this side of the move out of CO. Nice thing about packing your own stuff and moving via sealed and locked container is that we didn't have anything mysteriously come up missing in the move.

[DenverGP]

Ditto on the experience with PODS... We were able to fill a pod with most of the stuff in our house and have PODS pick it up about a month before the move. Left us with a more manageable amount to move via the truck. Everything in the PODS container arrived in exactly the same condition as when we loaded it, and they dropped it off the day after we closed on the new house.

A relative moved to CO from AZ, and paid professional movers to do it all... over 10k in cost, and a bunch of their stuff was either damaged or lost during the move.