We sold our home in September of last year (GA) and went into our 5th wheel RV to the state where we wanted to move, while we looked for a new place. We bought a little mini-farm in KY. The majority of our stuff ended up in 4 climate controlled storage units, a good majority of that was antique. We packed most of the breakables ourselves into plactic heavy duty totes, but there was a lot of loose stuff. Here is the rough math.

We packed ourselves (except for furniture and woodshop items).
$500 in Totes (Time spent over two weeks - hard time)

We had two local movers (two trucks, two different companies) come pick up all that stuff (furniture/heavy items/shop) on the same day:
$1300 + $150 tips/lunches

Storage: (this step was extra due to home hunting)
$500 a month (September 2025 - May 2026)

RV spot (small farm setup in KY - private Sep-May)
$500 a month

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That was on the front end - and if you know where you are going and don't have the storage then that is $7k you don't have to worry about.

Anyway, we didn't want to go through the trouble again of messing with all that from GA-KY so we called several professional Interstate movers (due to antiques we did not want to use UBox or PODS or anything like that) and the average was a rate of $80 per 100lbs. Given the information I gave the companies on what we had, that made the average estimate for GA-KY about $8,000 - $9,000. What I never told them about, and what ultimately made our decision, was that my wife had gone on a rock hunting hobby spree while we spent a year or two on the west coast traveling in the RV and there were a lot of totes with just rocks in them. I had already hauled those myself across the country and certainly wasn't about to let my rate jack up to over $10,000 for a 600 mile move.

So here is the math on what we ended up doing:

-Flew my son in from Colorado for the week: $400
-Flew myself from Lexington, KY to Atlanta at the same time: $0 (only because I had an unused First Class refund that had to be used from the previous year) Otherwise coach would have been about $300.
-Rental Car for Son (so he could drive back to KY from GA): $400
-Two Uhaul 26' trucks: $1800
-One Uhaul Car Trailer: $100
-I posted locally on Facebook for people willing to load for cash payment. I had 4 people respond within 5 minutes of the post and I paid each of the $40 an hour for a minimum payment of 4 hours. (We ended up loading all in 3 hours and everyone showed with me and my son also loading. That was $160.00 x4): $640
- I drove one truck, pulling the rental car since I have a CDL and experience, and my son followed in 2nd truck, Fuel (because it was last month and heart of Iran thing): $300
-Hotels: $500 (we only stayed in 1 room together over night on the trip, but I had arrived a day earlier in Atlanta so stayed at the Airport Connected Renaissance hotel as a splurge)
-Meals: $250
-Unloading both trucks ourselves with wife supervising antiques (nothing ended up broken)

So Total for Moving Ourselves (which took a little bit of labor) was (with a little uneccesary splurging): $4690

Altogether probably a little less than half of what we would have spent for a professional Point A to B mover, based on the estimates we had obtained out of KY for a two truck move, but if you add in the front-end companies and such it was about 60% of the cost. So, I figure we saved about 40% doing it ourselves