The Move…up the street

December 2019…Somehow in the span of one month, we landed a rental home up our street, secured a moving company, moved our whole house up the street, invited our neighborhood, friends and family to a holiday open house/project kickoff “before and after” party and continued to make design decisions that needed to happen before we broke ground. Oh and of course there were our two full-time - luckily I’m my own boss, so I could make extra space in my schedule for all the craziness.

We couldn’t believe we found a rental home 24 houses north of 631. Thanks to a Drury Lane buddy who lives on the north part of the street for pointing the For Rent sign out to me during an evening walk. She figured we had noticed it but with all the activity going on in our lives, we had totally missed it. Talk about universe moment! The house was owned by a builder. While it was smaller than ours as a 2 bedroom home and only one full bath, it would provide the space we needed for our expected nine months of renting. Plus it had a MASSIVE basement for storage so no need to rent a pod.

In-home pod

We loved our moving company - thanks again to great Drury Lane neighbors for several recommendations. We selected Alliance Moving and Storage located in Rolling Meadows. We appreciated that they are a totally local business including owning their own trucks even when possessions are moved across country. Their sales rep and move coordinator were super helpful in advising us in how to make the move efficient and cost-effective and their price was right.

One great tip from our move coordinator: “As you have such a short move, consider the kitchen to be a room where you will want to access your belongings right away. So consider moving most of that yourselves in your car, in the backseat. Just do one or two loads each day for a week. Minimal packing and unpacking.” Mike and I literally moved our dishes and many other kitchen items from a cabinet at 631 to a cabinet at 1009, and we had a kitchen ready to go before we moved in.

Balancing act by the talent at Alliance Moving and Storage.

The Last Breakfast

On December 7th — moving day — the Alliance team of four were on time, prompt and super-efficient. They were careful with all our belongings. We had one massive desk unit that they worked with patiently for nearly 45 minutes to get out of a rather narrow doorway without having to disassemble the whole thing. We started to wonder if it might be easier to just give up the piece and buy new. But finally one of them figured out just the right angle and the right pieces to disassemble to move it out. And when we moved into the rental home, they were equally as careful with placing items. When we realized several days later that we needed another armoire brought back up from downstairs storage, they were happy to send a couple of the team members back to help us out. We will be using them again!

Truck’s here…

Thanks to Alliance Moving for making the transition as seamless and easy as a household move can be!

Temporary home, same street, for at least 9 months…