I have asked a lot of people about moving in Roanoke.
Not in a formal survey kind of way. More like the way you ask when you find out someone just went through it and you genuinely need to know if they survived.
Every single person has a story. Every single one.
The couple who drove the moving truck three hours only to find out one piece of furniture, just one, would not go up the stairs. They stood there at the bottom, looking at this perfectly normal dresser, and it just was not going to happen. Not that day. Possibly not ever.
The woman who cried in a Home Depot parking lot at 9pm because she ran out of tape. Not because of the tape, really. Because of everything the tape represented at that particular moment on that particular night.
The guy who is still, to this day, not sure what is in the box labeled “misc kitchen.” He moved three years ago. The box is in the garage. He has decided he does not need to know.
Moving in Roanoke, Blacksburg, Charlottesville, or anywhere in between is a full contact sport. It has a way of turning reasonable, competent adults into people who cry about packing tape and make peace with mystery boxes.
And nobody really talks about that part honestly.
The moving content you find online is all tips and color-coded labels and perfectly staged photos of neatly packed boxes. Real moving looks nothing like that. Real moving looks like running out of medium boxes on a Tuesday night and driving to three different places to find more, only to discover that the ones from the liquor store are too small for anything useful and the ones from behind the grocery store are already soft.
Real moving is the truck being slightly smaller than you thought. The elevator being out. The friend who said they would help suddenly being very busy that day.
Real moving in the NRV, across the Roanoke Valley, or into a new place in Lynchburg is one of the most stressful things a person can do, and everyone who has done it has a version of the same story, with different furniture and different boxes and different parking lots.
So we genuinely want to know. What was the worst part for you?
The packing? The boxes that collapse at exactly the wrong moment, right when you had finally found a rhythm? The truck? Telling everyone your new address approximately forty-seven times only to still get mail at the old place six months later? Utilities? The scheduling, the waiting, the “between 8am and 4pm” window that means your entire day is gone?
Or was it that one piece of furniture. You know the one. The piece that made perfect sense in the old place and simply refused to cooperate in the new one.
Drop it in the comments. We are not here to sell you anything in this particular post. We are here because we are building something for people who move in southwest Virginia and we want to understand what the experience actually feels like before we assume we already know.
No wrong answers. All stories welcome. The more specific the better.
(And if you say cardboard boxes, we actually have something for that. But we want to hear yours first.)
Get Totely delivers reusable moving totes to your door before your move and picks up the empty totes after. No boxes to source. No cardboard to break down. Serving Roanoke, NRV, Lynchburg, and Charlottesville.
Book your moving totes today for a smooth move at GetTotely.com/Book-Now.