If you're thinking of moving yourself...

...seek professional help.

We managed to move ourselves and all our belongs the nearly 400 miles north to Sunnyvale.  And it is not something I would ever want to repeat.  I'm very impressed that we got everything down from our old apartment, into a U-Haul, through the 7 hour drive, and up into the new apartment.  By ourselves.  Including the stairs.  But, seriously, never again.  We had planned to leave on Saturday but quickly realized we were kidding ourselves as we spent all day Saturday packing and loading and left on Sunday instead.

Source: Uhaul.com because I somehow forgot to take a picture of our truck.

Things that saved our butts:

• An appliance dolly rented from U-Haul - it has straps for tying stuff on and rollers on the back for getting up or down steps.  Also, a wheeled cart borrowed from the apartment office.

• An elevator down from our old 4th floor apartment
• An extra roll of paper towels left in the old apartment to clean up the very last second dropping of a glass bottle of Bailey's
• Music for the drive and NPR podcasts for when my voice started going out after 3 hours of singing along
• Superhuman strength that comes from realizing that your sofa is wedged in the stairwell and you have to lift it up to free it even though a few minutes ago you couldn't lift it at all
• Plenty of patience with each other

Since our new apartment doesn't have an elevator, the unloading was a pretty challenging experience.  Then we decided to quickly find a couch on Craigslist so we could get it home using the U-Haul before having to return it.  And it was getting the couch up the stairs that almost killed us.  And, yes, we might be slightly crazy.

But it feels so good to be home!

Bonus Picture: Justin cuts up a kiwi using the knife from our emergency kit and a pizza box as a cutting board because we'd packed everything else.