Moving Day Fiascos

So as you all know Liz and I recently moved to a new apartment. We really like it, and it is quite a bit cheaper per month which is always nice. We don't have a washer/dryer but we will learn to cope somehow. Anyhow, I thought I would just set out some of the pitfalls along the way, in case any of you haven't heard them.

1) We found out the Tuesday before we were planning on moving that we did not have an apartment, because the previous tenant had not been evicted as planned. The best part is the apartment managers did not call us to tell us, we only found out because Liz called to finalize some details about the lease! So who knows if they ever would have gotten around to telling us we didn't have an apartment. Luckily while we were looking for other apartments we found a building just up the road from us that had an opening for that very weekend!

P.S. I talked to a guy I work with and he said that under D.C. law it can take as long as 6 months to a year to actually evict an unwilling tenant.

2) I made a reservation for a moving truck with Uhaul online about a week and a half before we moved. I even called the rental place on Thursday to confirm our reservation. Friday afternoon I get a text message telling me that my reservation has been moved to a different location and my truck won't be ready until 1:30pm. This was a problem because we had already announced the move in church, recruited friends, and reserved the freight elevators for 9am! So, I called and after being told there was no way I could get a truck before 1:30pm I sweared at the guy called him incompetent and he hung up on me (not wholly surprising). We ended up renting a truck from Penske (though it was significantly more expensive they guarantee their rental reservations).

3) After loading the moving truck and getting ready to drive over to our new place I realized that I didn't know where the truck key was. I thought maybe Liz had it, but she didn't. That's right within the space of 2 hours I had managed to lose the key to our fully loaded moving truck! So after a mini stroke, I called up the rental office and luckily they could make me a new key (for a small fee of course) and we were on our way.

4) Due to the delay of losing the key and having to get a new on we missed our reserved time on the frieght elevator. If any of you have ever moved into/out of a high rise building you know how important it is to have a reserved elevator. So we had to take up most of our stuff in the regular elevators and endure countless dirty looks and turn people away when we had the elevator stuffed full of junk. Luckily, the people that had it reserved after us were kind enough to let us take up a few loads of really big stuff (i.e. our bed and couch) and it turned out ok.

That's most of the moving drama, now we are just trying to get unpacked and situated in our new apartment. I'll be sure to post some new pictures once it looks presentable!