Moving Stress And Mobile App Medicine

After a little over 5 years living in the same little apartment, we finally moved. If you’ve been following on Twitter, I’m sure you’ve seen — it’s a painful process and when you have a lovely spouse (who is also a packrat) and a toddler in the mix, it’s downright stressful. I tried to manage as much of it I could up front, but in the hours and moments leading up to the final day, there was little control to be had. The process is just bigger than most individuals.

I ended up using a lot of local and on-demand services during the move, so I thought I’d list them here:

Movers — Delancy Street Movers. They were recommended 3-5x over by our friends on Facebook. We, too, had a nice experience and they were fast but also patient.

Food — No surprise, but I used Instacart and DoorDash a lot the first few days of transition. With a toddler around and in the middle of work, there was little time to cook or shop. We are finally back to a routine of cooking, but I’ve always felt on-demand services for us was less about opulent convenience and more about providing a support network that many folks have who live close to family or friends.

Labor — I used TaskRabbit a lot. Great experiences. I didn’t realize TR charged 30% rake on the transaction, but then lowers the rake % if you keep hiring the same rabbit. I get why they do it, and every rabbit we used liked the service and wanted to be hired through the interface to earn reviews and keep their platform bosses happy.

But the big winner for me was Move Loot. We need to get ride of old furniture and needed a lot of new furniture, but I had no time or patience to actually order online and deal with shipping and assembly, or to go to a physical store. I just wanted it to be easy and was happy to buy second-hand stuff, especially living with a small criminal (I mean, child). When you buy on Move Loot, it strips away the nearly every pain point associated with furniture. You can browse on your phone or the web. You can get alerts when things hit the market that you want. The app is easy to navigate. You can pay for stuff, schedule delivery, and checkout with a few taps. Most stuff comes assembled already. The drivers come and deliver the new stuff, and then they rip off the plastic protection, and put it where you want the stuff. Then you tip them via the app, and they’re off. Very friendly. I didn’t have to go to IKEA and then hire someone to lug the stuff back for me, or to pay someone to spend 2 hours putting it together. It was just done and scheduled.

I have no connection to Move Loot and don’t know much about the company, but it solved a problem for me many times and I’m sure relieved me of tons of additional stress that would’ve arrived otherwise.