I moved recently and it was a local move from San Ramon to Dublin so I rented a U-Haul truck and hired the Tony MacArthur, the soundman in my band The GROOVE Doctors, and one of his friends to be the “muscle” for the lifting the heavy stuff. I went to the U-Haul web site and saw they charged $19.95/day for a 17 foot long truck and only $10 more for a 24 ft. truck with twice as much storage capacity. I thought that $30 was quite a bargain for renting such a big truck.

The U-Haul web site had me fill in a few answers such as the number of bedrooms in the house I was moving and they calculated how much packing materials I would need, such as boxes, tape, pads, dollys, etc. The estimate for the packaging materials was over $600, more than 20 times the cost of renting the truck. So that’s how they make their money.

I didn’t buy all the packing materials that U-Haul recommended but I did get quite a few boxes of different sixes and some packing tape. The boxes made the move go much smoother and faster, plus they helped protect what I was moving. The boxes have all the various rooms in a house labeled and you just check which room you are packing up, then at the new house the movers can put the box in the correct room without you being there to direct.