To make everything fit in the moving truck, I took all of our beds completely apart to make them easy to stack. Here is Lauren, helping me get that job done. We also gave the girls bed a new coat of paint. It got some dings during the move, but we were able to just touch it up when we got here.
I have been filling my freezer and stocking my pantry full this summer. I was thinking I would have to throw most of my items away. But I carefully stacked everything into one of my freezers and packed it tight. We took this one down with us and it stayed frozen perfectly, no wasted food. The worst was having to empty it and refill it as we moved it from the basement to the moving truck and then out again. We ate a lot of corn, cabbage, and tomatoes before we left for the last 2 weeks of dinner. My children sure were thankful when we were blessed with some homemade meals made by friends.
We had brought in our little picnic table for the children to eat meals on since the table was taken apart. They enjoyed our picnic style meals for the last days.
Having beds taken apart and stuff packed away, we resorted to sleeping in the living room on the couches and doing most of our existence in this one room. It was okay, my children played with boxes, and diving off the couch onto the pile of blankets was a daily fun activity. They did an awful lot of coloring on boxes, because toys were packed up.
It seemed the house was almost always in a constant mess. The little that we didn’t pack just kept making messes. I would recommend you step your guard down and just don’t worry about it. We would clean up once a day and not worry about seeing constant mess. For the most part I was busy packing things up, no time to worry about everything being picked up.
I made sure to get ALL of my packing done the weekend before we were going to leave. It made the last week that we were staying perfect to be able to go visit with friends and relax a bit. I did all my shopping for items the week before so no need to do more running. That left the final days in Michigan perfect for getting together with friends and enjoying them, instead of worrying that I had to get back to finish packing. We had a great time, my children enjoyed playing with friends and it made the little bit of crazy that we had more normal.
We got our truck from Penske. I would so recommend them for one way moves. If you join AAA for $50 a year, and order online you can save about 20 percent on your purchase. That amounted to about $500 in savings for us!!! 
Want to know how to load a moving truck super fast???? Find another large family that can come and help you and you will get it done in a few hours!!! We had most everything moved within an hour. Then we had to stop and take doors off refrigerators, move freezers, the harder time consuming ones. I was still amazed at how quickly it went. Thank you again for lots of hands!!!
We got the truck early on a Thursday and we didn’t leave until Saturday. They give you 5 days to have the truck no matter what, so instead of holding onto it after we moved, we took the extra days beforehand so we could slowly pack, worked out the best.
I kept our meals simple and easy for the last few days. Nothing that would require any big work. I did bake some granola bars and used them for breakfast and snacks. I didn’t have a lot of junk food, tried to keep it somewhat healthy to avoid any meltdowns from the little ones. Here the children were eating breakfast, bananas and granola bars. Definitely kept some favorite shows on the laptop. That saved my sanity on more than one occasion.
The day before we left, myself and all the children went to stay with friends. We enjoyed a nice day of relaxing and having normal as Dad and Collin finished up packing the truck with garage stuff. I was able to wash some clothing, because the washer was packed and I didn’t want to have to worry about a bunch of dirty laundry when I got down there. I also gave all the children a bath and put them in their traveling comfy clothes. We enjoyed good food and fun play with friends. I even took a nap because we were supposed to be driving later that night.
Well my husband had called me earlier that day and notified me of an arctic storm coming through where we were going to be traveling. It was this freak of a storm that was going to be dropping snow and ice. I was like well lets just pray and leave it up to God, He knew when we planned on leaving and if He doesn’t want us to go, He will make it clear. Well I planned on leaving that night at about 11 pm. My husband called and let me know that the power was out and this horrible storm was blowing and it was raining and miserable out. He said it was impossible to load up cause he couldn’t see anything. I thought that I would get home, maybe help him load and then we would leave a bit later in the night.
I got home and it was miserable, cold, rainy, and awful. I decided to put the children inside and to bed. It was cold and we didn’t have any power so it made it worse. We slept in our coats and all bundled together. Thought the power would come on soon and we would go. We fell asleep, I woke up a bit later and was so cold, I just prayed “Lord, is this how our last night in Michigan was going to be?” I woke back up to the heat coming on and lights popping up. We had power!! Looking back, it gave my husband, son, and myself time to sleep. We were going to be driving for 19 hours and needed that sleep or we wouldn’t of made it. Funny because our street was the only one without power that night. Around the corner they had power, but not us. Also as we were driving through the mountains, they got hit with a ton of snow the day before. It gave them enough time to get the roads plowed for safe traveling. God is good!!!
The ride was long. We went slow. With 3 cars in a row, one being a moving truck pulling a car, it was slow. The children were fine, enjoyed seeing stuff, stayed occupied with new shows I got for them on the tablet. It was a pretty good time. We had bagels for breakfast, sandwiches for lunch and we stopped at McDonalds for dinner. Since we drove for so long, by 1 am I was tired. We pulled into a truck stop and slept for about an hour to get rejuvenated. That helped hugely. Driving through the mountains at 40 mph because it was cold and we didn’t want to hit ice was hard. It was dark, all I could see was shear rock on the left and drop off to the right. It was probably really pretty but I didn’t get to see it, just concentrated on the road. Maybe that was a good thing, I have heard it is intimidating to drive through that, but if you can’t even see it—its out of sight, out of mind:)
We filled the vehicle tanks full of gas when we left. My husband filled his moving truck 2 times with diesel and my van and our car we topped off 2 times. The first time cost me $25 which in a 15 passenger would be about 1/4 of a tank. The next stop was $50 and that was about 1/2 full. We did not fill them anymore. Tell me, how can you travel 700 miles in a 15 passenger van and ONLY use 3/4 tank of gas???? Only with God.
We finally pulled into our new home at 4 am in the morning. Again a freak accident of nature but it was so cold here. The home thermometer was 29 degrees. It kept my freezer foods quite solid without worrying about thawing!!! As I was driving, it was tough those last few hours, I was praying that the home would be sufficient. We had to do everything without seeing it in person, so we had no idea how it would look in person, but I can honestly say it is perfect!!!
Here are some not-s0-perfect photos, how it looked for about 2 days before we got everything put away.
Lauren is awesome at putting things together like bookshelves and beds. Something my brain does not like doing, I thank the Lord for her ability that way.
The weather returned to normal after a day, here we took some time out from unpacking to enjoy jumping into the leaves Collin and Evan were raking.
Fall is just beginning here so we still have lots of leaves on the trees. Living up on a mountain there is plenty of leaf fall. The boys did the entire yard to clean up all the dead stuff and by the next day it was covered again. 
Back to reality, putting beds together was the worst. The homemade ones were hard, because we built them out of my husbands brain, we finally got them but it took some time. I should have labeled the pieces, next move:)
Our neighbors probably didn’t like seeing so many boxes outside, it was only like this for a day, this is just where the children were playing while we unpacked.
Everything that I “worried or questioned about” God answered and made it good. I had a huge pantry at my old home, but this house didn’t have a basement pantry area. I was thinking I would be storing food in my bedroom, but the kitchen cabinet space is huge. I have plenty of room for all my pantry food plus my regular kitchen stuff and there still is empty cupboards.
The bedroom sizes are perfect. I will do some videos on that later.
All in all, God is awesome, always is, always will be. I am thankful for His guidance and so happy that He has made the move effortlessly so we don’t question the things we do.
Watch for some videos of our first weekend in North Carolina.
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