/diy/ - Do It Yourself

This would be incredibly useful because I plan on moving across the country next year by myself.

Seriously... help me the fuck out. What the fuck is DIY about moving? What? Do some goddamned Google searches, find a fucking mover, then fucking move. And please, for the love of fucking god, get into a crippling, debilitating car wreck on the way and spend the next 15 years on life support before your mommy pulls the plug.

>>84754
>implying all you need to do in order to move anywhere is find a mover

Someone's never been outside of mommy's house.

>>84754

You're an idiot. Crawl back into your hole.

You need money, lots of it. Best way is to find a job where you are now and take trips to where you want to live and go job hunting. You'll be more attractive to employers if you already have work.

Money is key. Like seriously you need enough cash to support yourself for a few months until you find work and start bringing in money. If you have someone to stay with then that's awesome but you'll still need some money to not be a burden and you never know when they'll ask you to move out. And it is still pretty hard to find work right now.

Personally I wouldn't budge unless I had 5k ready to spend and I'm someone that could literally be happy with just a weeks worth of clothes and a bag of personal things.

Planning on moving across the country next month. This is my tentative makeshift plan.
1.) If it doesn't fit in my car, don't take it. Will pack essentials - clothes, phone, laptop, printer, sleeping bag, backpack tent
2.) $5000. Estimate worst case scenario it will take 3 months to find some sort of employment (few hundred for the move, $1000 mo living expenses, $1000 for first month rent/sec deposit for apartment after I find a job, few extra hundreds for any emergencies that may come up)
3.) Find cheapest shittiest motel to live out of until I can land a job since its impossible to get an apartment without an income
4.) Take advantage of free wi-fi at coffee shops or w/e to search and apply for jobs)
5.) Rent PO box so I have a local mailing address
6.) Hopefully land job
7.) Get apartment and get settled
8.) Look for better job

>>84779
More than 5k. I meant 5k after I had all other stuff paid for and I was on day 1 in the hotel at the new location.

You can do it with just 5k. I'm sure many people have. But it's really really tough finding work and even with minimum wage you're likely not going to be able to get a full 40 hours a week and still might not be able to make ends meet.

>>84769

Except it's impossible to get a job in this economy if you are not local. Plus trips back and forth can get expensive and also requires your current employer to give you a lot of time off.

>>84782
Never said it would be cheap. I stand by it being the best.

>>84783

How much more would you recommend?

If you have a family or even a significant other, ignore the following:

Get a used RV or a cargo van. Live in walmart or other big-box store parking lots, or find an RV park that'll take off-season rates (assuming you are in north america.)

I'm at an rv park and they took cash and my identification. Didn't need to show them I had a job.

I've known a good few people who rented RVs or mobile homes for their "in-between houses" periods.

You might be able to find a owner-managed basement, garage, or whatever who'll take in a renter on a month-by-month basis.

That sting you feel? That's pride fucking with you.

>>84754
Bourgeois scum. You can save tons of money by moving yourself. Or are you of the manorexic/obeast variety who cannot imagine moving your several metric tons of animu and mango collection with your own two hands?

As you can see OP, having to haul your own shit counteracts the Magpie instinct to collect.

>>84779
Hope is not a strategy. If you have friends and relatives in your new town, make arrangements to couch surf or move in temporarily. Motels are actually expensive: The sign may say "$20 a night," and $20 looks like a low number, but multiply that by 30 and you have the cost of a 1 bedroom apartment. For 50% less ($400) you can rent a room or a studio.

And no, you don't need a job to get a lease. They'll just evict you when your money runs out. See: The crappy economy, ie the same reason you don't have a job. The rental company is just the operator, the manager, the go-between; they have to pay the actual owners of the properties. And if they're dumb enough to turn down someone with no job but with cash in-hand, that means their units are sitting empty.

Alternatively, and more in the DIY spirit, you could build your own damn house for $5000. In the outskirts of the city, not the downtown area, but you already posted that you have a car. It would also require living with Grandma for a few months while you talk to local officials to figure out easements, contact local construction companies who will give you free shit they were going to have to get hauled anyway, and of course build the thing.

But you may want to wait until spring for that. Construction requires enough warmth so your hands don't freeze, and the more light the better.

>>84786
Well 5K plus everything you figured.

The whole project is more of a "what's the least amount of money required to last the longest period of time before I find work" project rather than a "how to relocate to a different city" project. The two most important factors is money and time to finding a job so you want to maximize the first and minimize the second. So have as much money as you can possibly get and think about convincing a friend to make the move with you to split the bills with if you can.

Also prior to going write down all the info for your work experiences and references and make a top notch resume and print out loads and ready to hand in. And invest in a blazer, slacks, tie, button up shirt, and respectable shoes for interviews.

Provided you can land yourself a job that pays enough to live month to month before your cash runs out you can fix anything you fucked up in the process of moving.

>>84797

yes op do this. fuck being a normal person.

>>84803
"Normal persons" use u-haul, or have friends whose trucks they can borrow, and in the military "normal persons" haul their own shit up the gangway too. You are not talking about "normal," but "entitlement," as if you do not move your own shit, someone else has to.

Ok. So, the traditional way to prepare is this:

A month or so in advance, get the local rental listings, make a list of some likely places. Hop a flight out, rent a car, are check them out, and arrangements with your chosen landlord to move inpick one. At that time, you can make according to your schedule. You do not strictly have to do this, but it beats the fuck out of renting a place sight unseen, and DEFINITELY beats putting yourself up in a motel for a week with the u-haul bill racking up. Your food bill in this period will be high because you'll be eating out mostly.

2 months rent + a half month damage deposit is what you'll typically need for the landlord. They'll usually want a cashiers check or cash; cash is preferable because the bank doesn't charge extra for it.

In the month leading up to the move, spend a lot of time on Craigslist for your destination, getting an idea of what home supplies you can simply buy, rather than moving. In particular, think long and hard about every piece of furniture you own, as it will almost ALWAYS be cheaper to replace it in a new town than to rent moving equipment that will accommodate it. Put everything bulky up on craigslist, and scrap whatever doesn't sell. When in doubt, ditch it.

The most cost-effective way to haul your shit is with a typical 5'x12' enclosed rental trailer. Just about any car but the smallest of compacts can haul one, so long as you're not in a rush and your pride won't be hurt by grinding up mountain passes in the slow lane at 40mph with all the tractor-trailers. Ignore your car's rated load limit - what are you worried about, voiding the warranty? Odds are you're already exceeding it when you're carrying a full load of passengers anyway.

You can order DIY trailer hitch kits for almost any car for around $200 at retail, often with "no drill" versions available that use pre-existing bolt holes on the car. Check Autozone, JC Whitney, and the like. Don't forget the wiring for trailer lights - that kit will only cost about $25, though. Lots of trailer rental dealers will sell and install hitches for not much more than the kit price - it's really a DIY job and they use minimum-wage labor for it. 2" recievers are preferable, 2" equipment is much more common than the lightweight 1.25" stuff that installers like to slap on smaller cars.

Trailer rental and the hitch install should be under $1000. Load the heaviest shit you can in your car, as far forward as you can. Put the lighter shit in the trailer. The simple rule of thumb on trailer balancing is 60% of the weight in front of the axles. But the more nuanced rule is try to maintain a tongue weight of a couple hundred pounds, if you can manage that kind of precision.

Your car tires will be most likely at or near their rated load capacity - you need to fully inflate them or risk sidewall blowout. It's the sidewall flex that actually kills overloaded tires, not the weight or pressure. The more air pressure you put in, the less they flex - the low tire pressures manufacturers specify for passenger cars give them a cushy ride in commuter use, but are totally inappropriate for heavy loads.

I'm actually thinking about doing this, though I'd be leaving home here in Massachusetts and going from Providence to Seattle, since Seattle is where most of the tech jobs are and I have friends living out there that would be able to take me on as a roommate. Obviously I'd want to get a job first, and have about 5k saved up to keep me stable when I get there, but I'd be leaving pretty much everything I have behind. I'd be getting off family insurance and since my dad technically owns my car he'd hold on to it while I head west.

My idea is that I'd take a nice big suitcase full of my essentials such as clothing and important documents, laptop, etc. I don't want to drive on the off chance I get lost or have a massive breakdown and flying is just stupidly expensive. My plan would be to take Amtrak. Like for instance, if I left Sunday July 1st, I'd arrive in Seattle on Wednesday the 4th at the latest.

Is this reasonable? Or am I missing something?

I don't know what city you are planning to move to anon. This is a critical piece of the story people leave out here far to often.

When I got out of college I started travelling around and I found that most large cities have either a temp agency for weekly pay or a day labor outfit such as Labor Ready which pays daily.

Usually they are shit jobs but at least it is something while you are getting established. There honestly aren't too many jobs you can't stand for a day or a week.

I don't know what the situation is now with temps and am just guessing that they are kinda slim with the hours like every outfit nowadays.

>>84994
you've never seen a car tear up its transmission apparently. load limits can be bypassed, by small amounts for short periods of time, cautiously. but they do have a purpose.

Thanks for the helpful responses so far.

Not sure if this has been mentioned but sometimes the cost of moving something is so high that its just worth it to sell the shit and buy it new at your new location. For example, a heavy table you bought at ikea that cost you 90 bucks might cost that or more based on the fuel used to haul the weight somewhere. Make a tally of what it will cost to move it versus what it will cost to sell the stuff and buy new stuff later.

>>85789
Transmission stress is unchanged, because engine horsepower is unchanged. It's under the same stresses at full throttle whether there's a trailer behind it or not. Your 200ft-lb engine is not going to suddenly start putting out 250ft-lbs just because there's a trailer hooked up.

Getting into duty cycles, though, is where things change. Every transmission is built to handle the full-throttle load of the engine it's attached to, but the cooling hooked up to it may only be intended for short durations of full-throttle. Pickup trucks generally have cooling equipment sized to handle indefinite full-throttle operation. Pull that mountain pass at full throttle for 15 minutes, and it doesn't give a fuck. In a passenger car, the transmission cooler MAY be smaller - so making a full throttle pull for 15 minutes will likely put the transmission over it's normal temperature.

But it will not fail just from a coast-to-coast move. We're talking about 2 or 3 mountain pulls, which is just a couple of temporary spikes in fluid temperature. And the tranny gets a significant break at high altitudes, as the engine's torque falls off significantly from the thinning air.

So long as you're not driving stop-and-go city traffic 10 hours a day every day with those loads, it really isn't anything to worry about.

The manufacturers rated weights are more focused on the suspension than the drivetrain. Whatever load makes it stop cornering like a dream is the weight they slap on the sticker. It's meant to keep magazine reviewers from dropping 2000lbs in the trunk and then complaining about the slalom performance.

I'm going to move in Florence, Italy the next year to study goldsmithing.
Any protips on how to move to a different nation (I know italian perfectly btw)?

>>85112
Seattlite here.

FYI, the east-west Amtrak route into Seattle ("Empire Builder") is notoriously unreliable and infrequent. We have stellar N/S service ("Amtrak Cascades") from Portland on up to Vancouver BC, though.

Honestly, for the money, I'd either pay for airline tickets and save time, or ride the big grey dog and save money. For cross-country trips, rail isn't worth it.
Here's some fares I just internet'd up for an arbitrary date (First wed in jan)
Contintental Airlines: $220, 19 hours
Amtrak: $271, 75 hours
Greyhound: $126, 85 hours.

I'm not sure what your financial situation is, but you should know that there's a rental shortage in the Seattle area, and rents are pretty tough (I'm paying $900/mo for 690 sqft in a run down duplex, and most people consider that a hell of a deal for a 2bd). Luckily you don't seem to have a lot of baggage, so that helps. There are a handful of tiny, furnished efficiency apartments in downtown seattle for around $450 a month - the Alps is one apartment building that comes to mind. They are usually tiny, one room jobs, just enough for a bed, fridge, and stove, with a little closet-sized 3/4 bath.

Otherwise, if you're on a budget, you're going to have to share an apartment with roommates, rent a room in a shared house, or be looking at upwards of $600/mo for your own 1 bedroom.

If you're carless, do not take an apartment far from the transit routes shown on this map. Transit service in the suburbs is utterly terrible - there's a couple of frequent routes but for the most part it's rush-hour commuter service only. And all the in-city routes not shown on the attached maps run every half-hour at best, and usually stop running early in the evening.

>>85974
Huh. And I thought the busses in Vancouver were bad.

>>85982
Vancouver BC or WA?

The core routes on the frequent service maps are decent, but everything else is weak sauce - half hour service, falling to hourly after dark, if they even run after rush-hour.

There are a few decent eastside routes (pictured), and two or three in the south suburbs.

>>85112
Seattle-ite here as well. Take the greyhound. I left from ohio a year ago to get here, greyhound cost 250$, the 4 day trip was totally worth it. saw the country, and met my current roommate on the bus to seattle, so it worked out great. I came to seattle with 500$ and some determination. I lived in a homeless shelter for 3 weeks, got an internship in a tech position, got my a+, got another internship, and now I work at amazon.com, have my own place, and am doing quite well. it's all about how bad you want it.

Would it be typing up the final version of this thing into the sticky?

i strongly suggest using couchsurfing as a primer and scheduling a months worth of single week spots. tell the people your basic deal, and try to stay out of the way as much as possible.

use your time during the day to travel around the city, get free discarded newspapers and read the classifieds and shit. get some tourist maps or a cheap city map printout and map out your knowledge of the city by talking with as many locals as you can and marking down cool places and areas to avoid.

make friends with locals, because they'll help you a lot in a pinch, or just help you to build up a friend network. look online for local blogs, or local chat forums, and try to find like minded people wherever nearby, they may not be the best friends, but through them you'll likely make good friends.

use craigslist a shit ton to get a job and a sublet or whatever else you can get quickly.

once you get your place, dumpster dive the fuck out of your city and make furniture out of discards, replace said furniture as needed once you gots a job.

if you work this style plan hard, you could spend just the travel costs and some sustaining costs your first month while you build a social system for yourself.

>>87581 cont.
if you have a lot of stuff. i'd suggest either putting your stuff into a storage unit, or more strongly, i'd suggest considering taking only the things that TRULY make your life better. I've gotten rid of more than 75% of all the shit i've ever owned in the past 2 years and by getting down to the most useful and most compact i've saved a ton of space and hassle. (rip all cds and dvds to a harddrive and backup, get art on fabric that you can fold or roll up, get rid of furniture that cant fold down or flat pack.)

if you have friends wherever you're going, ask if you can store some of your shit in their attic or sleep on their couch for a certain while, cook with them and go on grocery runs with them, get a feel for the local stores and shit.

as far as money, i agree with the 5k thing mentioned all over here. you need the money, but be cheap and smart across the board so you can make it last if you have to.

K, so not op. I am trying to move to a nearby city, i've got a job in the city and a sublet set up. I need to figure out how to commute to my job while I don't live there. This will be a problem for 3 more weeks, see I don't have a car and public transit is not 24/7. Taxis are going to mean that I don't make a net profit.
Any pointers for couch surfing?

>>87600
Bicycle?