From this article on, I will be covering goings on in Carmel. I hope you keep on reading my articles.
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Last summer my husband and I visited a certain city for the first time and were captivated by it. We decided to leave Findlay, Ohio, where we had lived for about 5 years, and move to a city called Carmel, Indiana.
Being a new residential area still under development, you have to wait your turn for apartments because they’re in demand everywhere. We got our name on the waitlist, waited for about 6 months, and finally managed to make the move in February this year.
It will soon already be 3 months since we moved, our feelings about Carmel haven’t changed since that first visit, and we are still captivated by it. For us, it’s an ideal place.
It still seems like a dream that I actually managed to move to a place that made me feel intuitively, “I want to live here!”
I’m really looking forward to sharing with you about this wonderful, new city, Carmel.
In this article, I’d like to talk a bit about moving house in the US.
I think when it comes to moving house most of you would surely get a removalist to help, but for this move we had the mysterious belief that “We can do it ourselves, right,” and didn’t get a removalist. One reason is that a lot more people move by themselves in the US than in Japan (although it depends on the person of course), by renting a truck for do-it-yourself removals.
In conclusion, we can honestly say, “We never want to do that again!!”
All the same, doing it yourself does of course have some of its own benefits. Number one is reducing your costs, then, there’s no need to worry about getting the floor dirty by not changing your footwear when you carry your things in and out, as is the custom here in the US, and so on.
You’ll then need a truck to transport your things if you’re doing the move under your own steam.
We decided to rent one of the trucks for moving you often see around town under the name “U-Haul.”
It’s a company that offers truck rental and you can rent the size of truck that meets your needs. You can do all the contract procedures online, and they have locations in lots of places, so you should be able to rent a truck within a few minutes from home, unless you’re in a very rural area. The reason is that the trucks are made available at stores whose usual business is something else, as a side business.
On the day of the move, we went to rent the truck and were amazed by how big it was! Can you see from the photo how far it is to the back of the truck!?
(I’m also amazed that it’s OK to drive a truck this size with an ordinary license.)
When I came to think of it, I had never had a good look inside the load space of a truck before and was surprised how much more space there was than I had thought before actually I went inside one.
Just when we thought that space would be big enough, I got really worried that we wouldn’t fit everything in after all... It is hard for a non-professional to tell how much stuff there is in their home.
We started work in the morning, and by the time we had finished and handed in our old apartment key, it was already evening. When we got into the truck, we were exhausted, and headed for my husband’s parents’ home, which was along the way.
Although the back of the truck was loaded full of stuff, the driver’s and passenger’s seats together made for a comfortably big space! It was just like going on a road trip: We felt as though we were heading off on a long journey, but it was only about 2 hours away.
The next day we headed for our new apartment. We had reserved the goods elevator for our own use while loading and unloading, but it was such a long way from the elevator to our apartment... I don’t know how many return trips we did, but it was incredibly hard carrying the big stuff yourself.
Moving is not something I do much, and I have completely forgotten just how hard it was...
As you might expect, I learned the hard way that the best thing is to hire the help of a professional to remove your stuff and take it to your new home.
And so, yes, it was tough moving by ourselves for various reasons but having ridden on one of those “moving trucks” I see around a lot, it was a good experience!
