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Comment by SoftTalker | Hacker News Reader

Honestly the best way to move is to sell or donate everything and buy new for your new place. Get down to suitcases or stuff you can pack and ship via UPS.

Yeah some stuff has sentimental value but try to get past that as much as you can. It’s just stuff.

When my uncle moved when he retired he took what would fit in his car. I have never gotten that lean but I admire him for it.

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This is very situational. Many people have tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars of items, especially furniture.

He paid $14k for the movers. That would buy a fair bit of new furniture unless it’s really high end.

I see many scenarios where the items would add up to less than this. I see more where it doesn't. e.g.: What you say makes sense for a single person who owns a PC, a TV, and Ikea + amazon furniture.

Now imagine a couple or family, who's been (criticize the capitalist/consumer culture or not) buying nice wood furniture, has a well-stocked kitchen, multiple computers, hobby equipment etc.

I encourage you to run a rough estimate of your own household's items. Do the same for your a neighbor's; a friend's.

My nice wood furniture has had three owners and is almost 70 years old, so I certainly think it’s possible to own nice things and not be a wasteful consumerist.

I built my living room coffee table by hand with my father, who is now dead. I built my shop table by hand (to match the one my father had). Even ignoring the 10s of thousand of dollars it would cost me to refurnish a house to match what I have now (and the staggering amount of time finding suitable replacements), there just a ton of things I could never replace.

And yet when you die, the contents of your house (for inheritance purposes) will most likely be valued at under $10K and nobody will raise an eyebrow at that.

When I die, my body will be worth a pittance. But I still value it far more than that now.

I don't have nice furniture because my kids will value it for an inheritance. I have nice furniture because it is very pretty and extremely sturdy. It is okay to pay for nice things that you get value out of.

2 pieces of good (not ikea crap quality which you don't want to move around anyway) furniture would easily cost $14k.

You can buy high quality furniture for way less than that. You’re just paying for a brand that no one will even notice.

Or real maple and oak instead of veneer. Which can be reupholstered and sanded and refinished periodically as the piece ages.

It's hard to say w/o knowing what, but even getting a couple reasonably priced and finished Amish pieces for something could easily add up to half that. But if you're talking something like a large and well made leather sofa-recliner-sectional type thing it's plausible that it could add up to that much for one piece depending on size, construction, and leather.

High quality means different things to different people.

Plenty of folks will notice the brand, because they produce iconic designs.

I have an IKEA desk I’ve moved eight times and it’s still going great after 20 years. I think it’s the oldest thing I own actually.

I have an IKEA steel futon base of similar age and number of moves. It would take considerable effort to damage it.

You don’t want to really play the anecdotes game because I have had plenty of ikea crap that fell apart with 0 moves.

14k? I know people who own more than 14k worth of fishing equipment ... not including any sort of boat. A family of four with any sort of hobby, say four sets of skis/boots/poles, will easily hit 14k on that hobby alone. I don't want to think about how much all my climbing gear would cost to replace.

Packing up everything into suitcases is all well and good for single IT workers moving between generic white-walled apartments. People with kids and hobbies have stuff that takes up space.

>climbing gear

How much does a harness, shoes and some rope cost?

On the order of a few hundred per at most, but if you're climbing outdoors you probably will need a lot more than just those. Trad gear in particular can add up quite quickly.

In addition, it's not uncommon for dedicated climbers to have multiple sets of ropes/shoes (and even harnesses) for different situations.

That depends on whether or not you can fly.

When I took climbing, as a teenager, our instructor was very serious about getting the best stuff: shoes, ropes, crampons, carabiners, gloves, jackets, etc.

Not cheap, but he put it as “do you want to die?”.

Same with diving gear.

Crampons are not remotely close to standard rock climbing gear. Mountaineering yes, climbing no.

Been a long time, so I’m likely misremembering. I also did a great deal of camping and hiking, with similar admonitions.

Fruits of a … colorful … childhood. I was sent to a number of “diversionary” curricula.

Crampons are definitely mountaineering/winter hiking gear which I used to do a fair bit of. (For lower-grade winter hiking, various silicon spikes plus single-layer boots are pretty popular even among relative serious hikers up to some level.) Not rock climbing, which I always sort of hated :-)

But, yeah, even a decent collection of 4-season hiking/backpacking/camping gear--even if you exclude the previous gen stuff you don't really use any longer can easily get into the thousands of dollars though people do scrape by with consignment and the like.

But, by the way, that's one of the issues. In the natural course of things, you can pick up relative bargains over time, If you're presented with "repopulate your house in the next few weeks" not so much.

In fact, I'm presented with the latter in the next month or so. Will have to rebuy a bunch of kitchen stuff in particular fairly quickly and I'll probably just place some big orders with Amazon, Sur La Table, and a handful of other companies without doing much in the way of careful shopping other than pulling from various lists.

Yeah, true replacement cost is often well above "retail" because of the time factor. And hiking is one of those sports where you end up with a lot of stuff duplicated in bigger/smaller and/or warmer/cooler.

I never went out to buy a hiking outfit/collection after a class or whatever at a store. Had I, I'm sure it would have been more expensive and ultimately sub-optimal relative to what I own.

I'm talking about things like jackets of various weights, packs of various sizes. I have both medium (for wearing alone) and large (for when I'm wearing layers) jackets. I have gloves in various warmth levels.

Treat it more generally--gear that you are in some fashion going to trust your life to. It doesn't even need to be something fancy--a couple of days ago I was out on a hike and realized a companion was wearing jeans. The terrain was slightly scrambly (nothing that required any skill) and in a canyon that should have had a stream at this time of year. Fall into that in jeans and hypothermia becomes a very real issue.

Not all climbers are gym rats.

A full set of say a dozen cams, probably $1000. A set of tricams ($100). A couple sets of good nuts (2x$150). A set of hexes ($150). About a hundred oval crabs (100x$15) and a few beefy lockers (6x50$). Say 24ish quickdraws (24x$30). A half dozen belay devices/eights for various tasks (6x30$). Ropes are about 200 each for 50-60m dynamics. Any serious climber will own four or more. Plus some static lines for hauling. A set of jummars (2x150$). Lots of webbing for connecting stuff. A few thinner ropes for anchors and general utility uses. A couple pulley blocks (2x100). Rope bags. Gear bags. Cleaning tools. And a hundred other bits and bobs. Every wall climber also has an assortment of strange stuff, things few people ever see two of, for particular problems. For instance I have an ascender rated to catch falls, which is a useful self-rescue device. Such rare things are priceless.

https://www.ukclimbing.com/articles/features/nuts_museum_the...

That's just the technical climbing gear for climbing rock. There is also all the camping stuff used when getting to or staying near the rock.

Then there is the box of aid climbing / bolting stuff. And the first aid stuff.

That’s not anywhere near 14k.

It’s a fair fraction, on one hobby’s worth of stuff, nevermind the rest of the household (member’s!) items.

$14k just doesn’t cover replacing a household’s worth of stuff. If you still think it does, do a replacement value inventory of your place. And then update your insurance!

Uh… who is buying tricams and hexes these days? 100 carabiners??

They’re a collector and I bet they never use 90% of the stuff they bought. Even more reason to purge it on a move.

Tricams are still sold. They are great in horizontal or shallow cracks. They are also way cheaper than mechanical cams. Hexes are still sold under different names (DMM Torque-nuts are just small hexes imho.)

100 seems like way too many, but things add up fast. Each piece of pro will need one or two. A basic trad anchor setup (three bit of pro) will involve five carabiners (3x plus two to tie off, and maybe a sixth if you want to top-rope the belay). So if you have a long pitch with say 15 bit of pro, and an anchor on either end, you are easily talking about 30+ carabiners in use on a single pitch. But you won't use every bit of pro on every pitch. You will have maybe a dozen other bits hanging off of you. That's another 20+ carabiners. So, on a single not-complicated trad route (no bolts) 50+ carabiners is not unusual. Get into complex things like multiple ropes and owning 100+ is not unusual.

Now having them all be ovals is strange. I took a stance early on that I wanted to standardize as much as possible. I bought BD ovals in bulk over a few years in the early 2000s. I like them, at least for everything other than quickdraw ends, rather than the random assortment many climbers end up collecting bit by bit.

Very basic trad anchor (3 bits of pro, 5 crabs) https://www.theclimbinglifeguides.com/blog/rock-climbing-anc...

Well, you also need quickdraws and anchor gear if lead climbing outdoors, and this doesn't remotely start to touch on trad gear, but you can set yourself up nicely for climbing for about $500.

The person you replied to does not have anywhere near $14k of climbing gear unless they are into serious big-wall climbing that involves sleeping on the side of the wall, or else they run a rock climbing guide company.

Edit: Just saw they actually listed their kit out in another comment, which tracks closely with what I expected. They could probably replace all of it for under $5k.

Respectfully, consider that other people are actual people, and their lives are meaningfully distinct from yours. To wit, “climbing equipment” encompasses everything from the backpack of gym-climbing gear you describe to a half-ton of tents, rope, crashpads, anchors, packs, portaledges, outerwear, camp gear, etc.

Figure $3k or so for a complete set of gear to get you up almost anything in the continental US. Of course you can buy more or less depending on your goals.

It can add up. https://i.imgur.com/X5SNJZd.jpeg

But 14k is still a lot.

I’m sympathetic to the point you’re making – it wouldn’t be shocking for a moderately sized well-to-do family to have a bunch of expensive gear for some hobby – but I think you’re underestimating people’s abilities to do things on a budget. I think ski equipment could reasonably come to less than $1k pp, for example.

That’s a fairly significant amount of furniture.

Unless you’re buying mid-grade or lower IKEA or purchasing used, you’ll almost always come out behind by selling and repurchasing.

> He paid $14k for the movers. That would buy a fair bit of new furniture unless it’s really high end.

Not really? Furniture is expensive. Once you move out of the garbage tier, that's not a whole lot of stuff.

Heck, even at the low end of not-garbage, a couch runs in the $1k range. Something from Bobs Furniture Outlet, for example.

Note, I love Bob's furniture. I have a couch from there I bought 10 years ago and it's absolutely the most comfortable couch I've ever had. My comment that they're low end is not, in any way, to insult the quality of what they have. Rather, they're not expensive (the same couch at a slightly more "name brand" place would have been twice the cost; for no increase in quality).

A sectional at ikea can run several thousand dollars.

Which is all labor and logistics. Pile of crap.

All sofas have labor and logistics. The more expensive ikea couches are as good as other big box couches, which is to say, they aren’t premium furniture.

$14k is like one smaller piece of high end furniture.

That said, it might cover two or three rooms of carefully budgeted non-crap furniture. Or like five of lucky thrift store finds.

Fascinating perspective! I don't think anything in my house cost over $500, including beds, couch, TV and appliances. What item can you get for $14k?

Here's a couch from a retail store you've probably heard of that you can configure online for $12k.

https://www.williams-sonoma.com/products/bedford-sofa-uphols...

Personally I'd rather buy one from IKEA and use the change left over from $12k to buy.. a used truck to drive the sofa home in.. but apparently there's a market.

You can certainly go much higher for smaller companies producing actual custom stuff, using exotic materials, for a giant sectional instead of a single sofa, etc.

Thanks! I haven't heard of that store, and their website seems to be geoblocked in my region.

TIL that Williams Sonoma sells furniture. I thought they only sold kitchen appliances, pots and pans, etc.

Check out design within reach. Fancy furniture can be incredibly expensive.

Apparently it’s not within reach for most people?

Furniture is on my list of things where there used to be a range of "solid, and you can make some choices" that was accessible to a lot of people, that has turned into "you can get whatever you want as long as it's made of particle board and laminate and will have a very finite lifetime." Because the old "solid and you can make some choices" zone is mostly upper middle class plus now. (Naming of that site aside.)

Just “made as if it’s not supposed to be replaced every five years” can bump the price of a sofa way higher than $500.

Doesn’t need to be $14k, but probably $4k bare minimum, without paying a premium for a brand name or anything like that, nor going with leather.

The cheaper ones almost always use low-density foam that compresses badly with use in a couple years (IKEA is a big exception here! But also most of their sofas are more than $500…), frames that start to get iffy in a few years, and upholstery that looks ratty after a similar amount of time.

I think a Stickley dining set or side hutch is probably ~$12k not on sale, and a sofa could probably go anywhere from $6k to $20k, but YMMV. (I don't personally own anything like that.)

But even brands like Herman Miller or Ekornes can really add up. (And I don't think of them as being the highest-end of things. Even hiring a quality woodworker to make something for you can end up similarly priced depending on detailing, finish, wood species, etc.)

One Eames chair is about $6-7K. (Not that I own but, but I'd take a donation ;) )

I made a lot of my furniture--it's hard to replace.

For me it isn't about the cost as much as it is that I've tailored my possessions to be what I like. If I have it, it brings value, and I probably like the details enough that it's hard to replace without getting an exact replica.

It is very situational—I get that. But the fact of the matter is that most people have way too much stuff. This creates a huge amount of problems and headaches if you have to move.

Most of us here can probably agree that moving is a very good time to assess a lot of property. Much of which you probably were given/acquired at some time or another and really don't use.

I had a fairy minor (in the scheme of things) kitchen fire earlier this year. (Not my fault. Microwave burst into flames in the middle of the night.) Most of the contents are probably salvageable (or determined best replaced under replacement policy).

But I intend to be fairly discriminating as I move stuff back into the house. I had already started doing some sorting and donating/chucking bu this will accelerate it.

We're on the same page! I agree, and pine for the days before I acquired too many things. The contrast is observation: Most people I know, myself included, do not live that minimal life style. I know someone who does; he lives in a van and loves it; owns few physical belongings, and most are in storage. He's the exception; not the rule.

Personally, I have a molecular bio lab at home; I know (had to calculate for tax purposes) that it cost ~12000 USD including reagents, shipping costs etc. I have a nice 3D printer, loads of tools, a well-stocked electronics lab etc. All see regular use. A few pieces of oak furniture. I know that my personal hobbies are weird (Maybe not for this crowd?!), but many people have comparably equipment-bound ones.

Now, picture being married to someone with a comparable set of items (Furniture doesn't double of course), and kids...

At some life stages and situations, this makes total sense. I’d think those are predominantly when one is embarking on a new stage, and moving as a part of that. Graduations, retirement, marriage, divorce, … . But someone moving involuntarily (job change, new posting, …), perhaps with a partner, perhaps with children … it’s hard to begrudge that person bringing many of their things along to ease the transition.

There’s a reason the US military pays for movers.

If someone gave me replacement value for my stuff I would not have an issue with this. But realistically nobody is going to give $50k+ to replace all your furniture, electronics, dishes, tools, and so forth. And it only really adds up if you either (a) are wealthy enough that it's not a meaningful cost, or (b) barely have anything in the way of furniture and tools. It's also complicated by things like decently made shelves that aren't wildly expensive being much harder to find than 20 years ago. Like if I could get equivalent shelves adjusted for inflation donating and replacing them would be fine. But I literally can't - I can only find cheap crap or rather expensive stuff that's moderately nicer than my old stuff.

Yes, next time I move I will sell or donate my $100,000 piano and simply buy a new one in the new place.

Or just don’t have one? Most people don’t own $100,000 pianos and somehow they make do.

But they do have one, so your point is moot.

What a weird take.

I am sure most people wouldn't refuse to have a $100 000 piano if they had space for it.

Eh. I mean, I don't have a piano, but I think a world in which no one ever does anything that can't be done on a laptop computer, would not be a better place.

If you take the ratio of amount of time I play my piano to the TCO of my piano, I am expecting to spend something like $2-5 TCO / hour of entertainment (without considering resale value in ~30 years) over my life. That is a ratio that is better than most forms of entertainment. It rivals computer games, which are also pretty good on TCO / hour of enjoyment.

That is even the case with a very high-end instrument. Perhaps more people should have things like pianos.

A guy near me literally gave away a Steinway piano. Like, a real one worth at least 8K (verified it online).

Me being too slow to get it is one of my great regrets in life.

Did you look into how much it costs to move it and have it tuned? It’s a significant fraction of the supposed savings.

Yeah, free pianos are usually being sold at the appropriate market price. Often they are badly beat up: the action may not have been maintained, the strings may have been detuning for 5+ years, some notes may not even be tunable any more. On top of that, the moving and setup costs are huge.

Having had a piano (an older Yamaha upright not even a grand) damaged in a move in the past - I will NEVER EVER allow general movers, no matter how highly rated they are, to handle any expensive musical instruments of mine.

A couple of my friends have used Modern Piano Moving in the past to move a concert grand reliably and they seem to be pretty highly rated.

https://www.modernpiano.com

This works when you have cheap and/or limited furniture.

Better/more expensive furniture is difficult to sell but also valuable enough to keep.

Selling stuff, especially if you're well outside of a major city, is sort of tough. Yard sales don't really bring in the cash and take some work. Most people probably don't want the stuff you don't want and even selling that takes effort.

Right. You lose money _and_ time; the worst combination.

My example is that I have a pile of laserdiscs that some retro collector probably wants but I'm not going to individually list them on ebay for $3 each. Maybe I'll put the whole package on Facebook for a few hundred and see if someone bites but that's about as far as I'll go.

I do live at the end of a long driveway on a busy road and I've found that a good way to dump old lawn equipment and furniture for free.

>> Honestly the best way to move is to sell or donate everything and buy new for your new place.

One problem is the delays on new furniture. I saw delays of 6-14 weeks on furniture when I last moved. I purchased a kitchen island from Ashley Furniture in 2021 which has still not fully arrived (the side-pieces are still pending in 2025) even though payments started as soon as the first item was shipped.

Also, you may find that furniture prices in 2025 are not what they were when you last moved given inflation.

I had a kitchen fire recently with all the associated smoke damage mitigation. One of the "leave it where it is" commands I gave was a good sofa (that I bought second hand off my brother) which I really liked and (almost) perfectly fit in the space. One of those things where I was probably just over some threshold of various processes (and insurance coverages) kicking in though not really necessary for a lot of things. Pushed back on some and will see how successfully at the end of the day.

One problem is that no one is incentivized to save you a lot of inconvenience and a year of living in a house that's not really set up yet.

I ordered by new sofa in February. I expect it in May.

It's just stuff you can or can't get. How would I know I can't get sofa? How much does assembling the furniture take? Do I book someone to help me with that or so I just pay for assembly? How much is the new mattress and why waste the old one, expensive and now destined to the skip?

How much is going to cost me the living room equipment? Not much, two gaming consoles, TV, 7+2 setup with a decent, 8k, flexible AVR.

Do I take the hit on buying the new motorcycle? Old, perfectly fine but a bit beaten bicycles will have to be thrown out as they look quite nasty (even though they ride well, in my currently 5th house), so it's a few grand on bicycles as well.

Do I need to throw out my network equipment as well? I mean, I could probably sell it on ebay for a fraction of the value and buy new for 20 times what I'll get from my old one, then just get through the pain of setting new software anew...

Etc, etc. I'm glad it works for you but it's laughable to offer your solution as a "best way to love" to everyone without knowing their circumstances.

That sounds super wasteful.

I'm my 40s over here and in my life I've owned 3 full houses of...stuff, so much stuff, really nice stuff!!! Now I own almost nothing and life is much easier. I find the comments here really funny, now I am free I realize how trapped I was by my trappings, your uncle was a smart guy.

There gets to be a point where you have to assert you own the stuff, not the other way around. And cull ruthlessly. It's hardest with a partner or if you grew up frugal and get hung up on "giving it away to good hands."

>Honestly the best way to move is to sell or donate everything and buy new for your new place. Get down to suitcases or stuff you can pack and ship via UPS

The best way? Really? Perhaps if you're comfortable enough financially in a way that most people in the U.S, or even more so, the rest of the world are not.

I mean, how wonderful if you have the discretionary budget to simply sell at a typical major discount or donate away most of your major physical possessions and just buy everything new. For many, many, if not most people, attempting such a thing would be a huge economic blow in addition to the already often heavy costs of moving.

If some of the advice and observations often given on this site seem like naval-gazing, bubble-dwelling nonsense, it's due to laughable comments like this one.

Yes. It's a cliche but it's true. Your stuff owns you.

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