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I've never been very good at getting people to help me to move, partly because I don't want to then be asked to help them move. And I've found that the labor one can find for a hundred bucks a day outside just about any big box hardware store is going to be far more helpful and efficient than the labor you'll get from a bunch of disgruntled office colleagues anyway. My advice? Give your friends the day off and hire a couple freelancers to do the work with you.
I learned the downside of having friends help with a move a number of years ago when I was in management at a company with around a hundred and fifty employees, many of whom thought that doing favors for a manager was a good way to keep their job. On the day I was going to move, employees of the company started showing up to help me. I wasn't going to turn them away, and they did make the work go quickly. And when it came to moving heavy furniture down the apartment stairs, I guess I was glad I didn't have to do it by myself.
But from that experience I learned that getting people to donate their time to help you can be far more expensive than hiring a couple of day laborers. By the time I'd bought lunch for everybody and taken everybody out for drinks after the move was done, I'd spent upwards of five hundred bucks on the labor. It would have been just as fast if I'd hired two guys from the big box store or the yard outside the truck rental place, and if I'd given them two hundred bucks each they would have gone home to their wives happy that night.
Help is usually a benefit on moving day because it really needs to be moving "day." Singular. Not moving "days." The only way to move is to do the whole thing in a day, from early in the morning to late at night. Pack it, load it, haul it, unload it, unpack it without going to sleep. It packs all the stress of moving into one day, which means you can go about life as usual the rest of the time instead of having The Big Move eat up weeks or months of your life.
When you move everything you own in one day, it's exhausting. Exhaustion actually makes you more willing to get rid of stuff, and a move isn't really a move unless you lighten your stockpile of personal possessions by at least 20%. Moving day for a person is like a big corporate layoff: it's the excuse you do need to cut all the fat you don't need.
Another key to a successful move is to use a storage pod as the method of conveyance. A storage pod is basically like the back end of a moving truck, but they drop it off at your place, let you fill it, then pick it up and move it to your new place, and leave it there for as long as you need to unload. After you've moved in one day, you're not going to want to unpack right away, so having a storage facility parked conveniently on the curb is a huge bonus.
So take it from an expert self-mover. Move it all in one day, hire people instead of using your friends, and use storage pods as your method of conveyance. Do that, and moving becomes a breeze.
I'm a professional mover with a passion for writing about moving boxes. For more information, check out Door to Door.
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