The (pre) Move

Now we knew where we were going, we just needed the money, and somewhere to live.

Jamie had been on workcover for a while by now, and he was waiting for a final payout for a knee injury. That money arrived right about now.

My parents, who still had their 30' caravan in their backyard, offered for us to stay there while we found a place to stay.

After a month or so of slowly packing things up (I had lived in this house for 10 years) we decided to drive to Lincoln for the weekend, taking a trailer load of our stuff with us. Jamie had never been there and wanted to see the place before we moved.

So off we went. All 6 of us. It was a long and exhausting trip. In the middle of summer with no airconditioning in the car. It took us all day to get there. We ended up unloading the trailer into my parents shed, even though the land agent said we could stay there for a month, but couldn't store our stuff there. Self storage was too expensive.

We weren't sure how we were going to move the rest of our stuff over. We estimated it would probably take another 5-6 trailer loads (and that didn't include the animals) to get our stuff there, and I knew we couldn't do that with the kids in tow. Then there was the problem of storage, school (because of the time it would take) etc...

I was reading the paper on the morning that we were there and noticed an add for a shipping container rental. It said you could rent the container and that they would move it for you. So we gave them a ring and got a quote $2 000. We thought that would be a much better idea. they would drop the cont. off at our house, leave it there for 2 weeks for us to pack then pick it up and transport it to Lincoln for us. Then we would have 3 weeks to unload. So we went ahead and ordered the container.

Not long after we ordered it, they rang back with a more accurate quote, now worked out on distance. It had shot up to $2 500. Ok, we could probably manage that. When we got the bill there was another shock. They had neglected to tell us that that hadn't included GSTax which was an extra 10%. So now the bill was $2 750. We had to ring and ask for extra time to pay, that was ok