PODS Review – I Moved Across The Country with PODS Moving (Price, Damage, etc)

i recently used pods to move across the country and i'd like to share my experience with anybody who's looking at using pods to move so i'm going to share my personal experience with using a full 16 foot pod to move from indianapolis to los angeles in the next few minutes i'm going to tell you all about the good stuff and the bad and how much stuff got broken in the moving pod and how much it costs to use pods to move across the country but first to give you a bit of context about my particular situation i owned a 2 000 square foot condo in indianapolis fully furnished and i left it vacant for a few months as my girlfriend and i went to spend the winter in fresno for a travel nurse contract she took basically after experiencing a west coast winner or more so a lack of winner on the west coast and spending some time at yosemite and the sierra nevada mountains we decided we didn't want to drive back to indianapolis and move back home and instead we wanted to stay in california and move to the west coast permanently so we got a short-term furnish rental just south of laguna beach and fell in love with southern california and without having an address or a place to move our stuff to i listed my condo in indianapolis for sale and decided to move to socal it didn't take long for our newly renovated condo and a great location to sell i have another video on this coming soon but when we started getting offers on it we realized we had a pretty serious cross-country move we needed to get done somehow and soon moving to the west coast we realized we needed to do some serious downsizing and we realized that we were only going to be able to afford a much smaller place probably 700 to 800 square feet with one bedroom and one bathroom and no garage and we were coming from 2000 square feet two bedrooms two baths and a two car attached garage before we even started looking into using pods for moving we first started to sell a lot of our large items basically we had two living rooms so we had to get rid of a large couch a few living room chairs all of our bar stools and i had to clear out the garage too including both of my stand-up paddleboards 3 bikes and a lot of other stuff we did compare a few companies and moving solutions online but ultimately it seemed like pods had the solution we needed and felt the price was well worth it for the value provided in the past when i moved i usually packed everything up myself or paid movers to come move it all for me or load it up in a u-haul and drive it myself but this particular move was a little bit different and for a few reasons for one the distance was enormous the longest i've ever driven a u-haul was from atlanta to indianapolis and i was towing my car behind the u-haul as well but the whole experience was very nerve-racking driving a massive u-haul truck isn't like driving a normal car you have to really pay attention a lot more than just cruising down the highway effortlessly in a car not to mention the gas mileage in a giant box truck is really really bad and it only gets way worse if you go faster than 55 miles an hour an 8 hour drive in a u-haul was manageable and it can be done in one day but if we didn't use a pod to move to california and instead we decided to drive our stuff in a u-haul it would have taken probably three or four days which would have meant we would need to get motels to stay along the way combined with the truck rental costs the gas costs the motels and the stress of driving a massive box truck for thousands of miles we decided it wasn't worth it to drive it ourself the second big thing about this move compared to some of my other moves in the past was the timing for one we didn't even have an address that we could have our stuff delivered to so even if we did drive all of our stuff in a box truck ourselves we wouldn't have anywhere to drop it off the other part of this point is we didn't have a set move out date in place and we needed to downsize a lot of stuff before we ended up loading up our pod with the pod service you can have them drop the unit in your driveway and you can load it up as you're ready then after the pod is packed up and ready to go you can just have it shipped and you can schedule your pickup date accordingly in our case it took nine days to ship the pod from indianapolis to a storage facility in the los angeles area which was perfect for us because we still needed to fly back to california and find an apartment to rent no stress right so let's take a look at the numbers for how much it costs to use a pod to move across the country here's a side-by-side comparison of a seven foot pod versus sixteen foot pod when i called i got a quote for a seven foot pod and also a sixteen foot pod initially i wanted to use the medium sized pod but for a long distance move you have to choose either the small size or the large size the total cost quoted for the 7 foot pod was 2 804.49 while the 16 foot pod was quoted at 3 239.39 i felt like it was well worth it to pay the extra 400 or so to have a much larger pod to move more stuff and i'm really glad we went with the full-size pod instead of the smaller seven foot pod here you can see my seven foot versus 16 foot pod quote side by side and most of the cost you'll notice is the transportation mileage almost the entire cost of the move is just the transportation mileage alone you can see the fees are kind of broke down in a very manageable way and i should note that they build me in three separate transactions it's kind of like a pay-as-you-go service the first bill i paid was 507.59 this covered the contents protection delivering the pod to my location the lock that you put on your pod and also a 10 000 contents protection for me i also had to pay 239.99 for a monthly rental of container in storage center this is basically just the cost to have the pod for up to a month the second bill i got from pods is the 2500 to have the pod shipped from indianapolis all the way to los angeles the third and final bill i got from pods is when they redelivered the container to my new address in los angeles this fee was 297.57 as you may have noticed there's a slight discrepancy in the initial quote versus how much it actually cost me for my pod my final total build cost was 3 372 dollars first the quoted price of three thousand two hundred thirty nine dollars and thirty nine cents the reason for the difference is because i ended up moving to a different area of california than i initially had them quote me for so it cost just a little bit extra not a big deal so obviously three grand for a pod isn't exactly cheap but i felt like it was well worth it to keep the majority of my furniture items i purchased over the years rather than sell everything i own at a deep discount or get rid of it all really fast the way i thought of it was i could sell some of my old stuff that i really didn't use anymore and downsize to help me pay for the cost of keeping all of the stuff i do want to keep and the stuff i actually use all the time communication with the pods team members was a breeze from the very first call to pods they were very clear about the pricing how everything worked and the flexibility and changing dates was great the day before the delivery or pickup of the pod they sent a text message giving a three hour delivery window and the day of the delivery of the pod the driver called me and gave me a 30 minute heads up of when he would arrive one of the things i was most impressed with about pods was the ability of the delivery guys to maneuver the pod with a high level of precision for me both of the pod drop off locations was a fairly tight space but the driver was able to get the job done with no complaints whatsoever it seemed to me like the driver was enjoying the challenge of dropping the pod off and using their skill with the delivery machine to get the job done loading up the pod was a lot of work but this is to be expected there are tips on how to load up your pod inside the pod and they recommend you distribute the weight evenly i have to admit that we loaded up a lot of the weight in the back of our pod with a really heavy headboard and a couch but we attempted to even it out with furniture and other boxes later one piece of advice i recommend is getting some ratchet straps and start hooking them up in the back of the pod before you load up too much stuff because it's going to be really difficult to climb back there and get to the straps in the back once you have your furniture in there we also purchased some sort of furniture wrap which is basically kind of like a big saran wrap for our furniture and it protects it in a lot of cases we use old clothing to protect the corners of furniture and then wrapped it up with the big furniture wrap one mistake i made was not wrapping the bottom of the couch and i let the bottom of the couch make contact with the pod floor and it ended up getting pretty dirty but the couch was actually already pretty dirty to begin with and it really just vacuumed up pretty easily you can save a ton of money buying the furniture wrap and the ratchet straps on amazon instead of from lowe's or home depot i put links to the ratchet straps and the furniture wraps we used in the description box below this video if you want to buy the same exact stuff that worked well for us i'd also recommend you grab a mattress bag on amazon while you're at it because it'll keep your mattress clean and it'll make it much easier to move so how much of our stuff got damaged in our moving pod overall 99 of the items made it across the country in the pot undamaged i was kind of nervous about the 70 inch tv but we got one of the big tv boxes from lowe's and the tv didn't get damaged at all somehow all of the furniture made it undamaged the only things that did get damaged was a canvas frame that one of the rugs fell on top of the frame and broke the wood frame but the canvas itself is fine and it's our fault for not better securing the rug from falling onto that canvas frame one of our kitchen floor mats did get some creases or some sort of lines indented into it but these might work their way out over time i am really impressed with how well these kitchen floor mats have held up for five or six years now but they may have finally got a little bit of damage on them and again that was probably just my fault for just kind of throwing them in on top and not really protecting the mats we put all of our lamp shades inside of boxes a couple of them kind of did get dented in a little bit but they popped right back out and they still look just fine so overall i was very anxious opening up the pod to see how the stuff shifted in the move across the country but the way we ratcheted it down and the way we stacked the boxes and stuff it seemed to held up just fine and nothing got damaged so it turned out to be a really good experience with pods moving across the country i'll take a moment to touch on security they give you a lock with your moving pod and you're expected to have that thing locked up when when they come pick up your pod so they're not going to take your pot away unless you have that lock on there so you know you're not the you know that the door is not going to just pop open on you when it's locked up and also you'll know that since it's locked up and you're the only one with the key nobody's going to be going through your stuff and nobody's going to be taking anything another concern i had with the moving pod was how waterproof is it it says it is water resistant we did move in the late spring and while we were loading up the pod while it was out in the driveway we did get a couple days where it did rain on top of the pod quite heavily and there was no sign of any water getting inside of the pod and everything was dry upon arrival in california so overall i'd have to say i highly recommend using the pod service it was particularly beneficial especially in our particular situation when we didn't have a final address for our pod to get delivered to they kind of just like roll with you in the process and you don't need to like tell them every single exact thing about your move right away you just you can tell them where to drop the pot off and then you can basically keep it for pretty much as long as you want to and then when you're ready for them to pick up the pod you just call them and let them know i will say i would recommend giving them a decent amount of time like heads up time like if you want it picked up like a week or so from the time you get it finished you probably want to schedule that soon to make sure they're not too booked out in advance for us it kind of worked out to the point where like we needed time to go apartment shopping when we got back to california so nine days of transportation time worked out just fine for us so that's gonna about summarize my pods review i hope this pods i hope this moving pods review has been helpful to you go ahead and click that like button if it has helped you you can subscribe to the channel to learn more about the renovation project and some of the real estate projects i'm getting involved with now also if you have any questions about the moving pod go ahead and leave a comment in the section below and i'll get back to you as soon as i can and then also don't forget to check out those amazon links below the video in the description box to grab your ratchet straps and furniture wrap to help ensure you keep all of your valuables protected in the move so matt here with tell happy tv thanks for watching the video and i'll see you in the next one guys

Channel: TailHappyTV

Views: 150,348

Rating: 4.9256678 out of 5

Keywords: pods, pods moving, moving pods, moving pod cost, price of moving pods, moving across the country

Id: qq7DUUW658A

Length: 12min 55sec (775 seconds)

Published: Sat Jul 04 2020