We had placed our casita order in the fall of 2023, planning to drive to Texas to pick it up May 2024. We still have an apartment and plan to finish the lease fall 2024. Since we were already doing the drive over to Texas to pick up the Casita, we figured we might as well bring some stuff to store. After our lease ends we don’t plan to be back anywhere near the area we are at now, so we didn’t want to store things here.
So we packed up a 6×8 Uhaul trailer and towed it to a town outside the Casita factory. We’ll bring the rest of our stuff either in a small Uhaul or a van when we end our lease. This just makes things so much easier when our lease comes to an end. Rather than needing to pack up and move an entire apartment, we’re packing up much much less. Many items we still have in the apartment will be donated or thrown out such as our couch, bed, TV, dining table and chairs. Those items are over 10 years old, so whenever we get a house we can get new furniture.
The Uhaul trailer actually felt harder to tow compared to the Casita, given that the Uhaul had no towing brakes (the 6×12 trailer has brakes). The size was perfect for what we had: about 9 Home Depot black and yellow bins, 2-3 smaller bins, and 2 larger bins. Then we had a lot of random items like a bed frame, rug, papasan. The trailer fit surprisingly more than we expected.
When the trailer is empty, it’s easy to pick up and move on your own. But we made the mistake of parking the trailer and unhitching, and then packing it. Otherwise our truck would be blocking the road in our complex parking lot. We hadn’t thought about how we’d lift it to re-hitch to the truck :/ We had completely finished when we realized we needed to re-hitch. So we ended up having to unload most of the items, re-hitch, and then reload the items. It didn’t take too long but we felt pretty dumb after that happened.
Unloading the trailer in Texas was quite fast since the storage place had carts to move things. Texas in May was very hot, unlike the east coast, so we were drenched. Then we dropped the trailer off at the dealer and that was it.
Unfortunately we can’t do another Uhaul trailer for moving our other items since the truck will be towing the Casita. Uhaul trucks and cargo vans were quite pricey (nearly $1000) so we’re not sure if we’ll rent one of those or do a mini-van and pack it as much as possible for that drive back west.
Update October 2024
So we ended up renting another Uhaul trailer and driving the rest of our stuff to Texas and drove back to our apartment to end the lease and get the Casita. The drive from NC to TX to NC took us about 3 days. Uhaul trailers are quite cheap, around $100, and then we paid gas. Definitely much cheaper than getting a moving truck (over $1000).