Obstacles: over, under or around (Monica)

The realities of moving every 6 months require that we be light. It is economically and environmentally unfriendly to move a household of furniture and personal items across the country twice a year. It would have cost about $4,000 to move a 1 bedroom apartment from California to Florida.

Here are 2 solutions that we employed to work around this obstacle:

1) Rent Furnished and just take your clothes and personal items.

This is what we are doing for Miami. Renting a fully furnished condo was a bit more expensive, but considering the cost savings in not moving our furniture, it was a bargain. I figure for 6 months, the difference in renting furnished will be $1,200 vs. $4,000 to move our stuff, and we get to live with cool, modern "design out-of-reach" type furniture. When we leave for Miami, we will be taking only what fits in the back of the Element, plus the 2 bikes on the roof racks.

2) Garage Sales - buy when you get there, sell when you leave.

When we moved from Portland to Sacramento 7 months ago, we did not bring a lot of furniture. We needed to supplement what we brought. 2 days of craigslist and yard sales and about $120 purchased the following: 2 leather chairs as you might find at Dania or Scan Design or another high-end Scandinavian furniture store, a coffee table, a dining room table that we used as a desk, 2 dinning room chairs, a TV, a vacuum cleaner, some side-tables and some pots for plants. The photo above is a picture of what we sold 2 weeks ago at a 4 hour yard sale. The items we sold consisted mostly of what we had bought in April (plus a few other things like Joe's naked lady painting). What didn't sell, went immediately to Goodwill, but I think we grossed just over $100. Bottom line: we effectively rented a half a house of furniture for 6 months for about $20!

I'm sure we will be faced with other obstacles with our next move. It is fun to find creative ways around the challenges. This is one of the reasons we are doing this.