My fella and I are leaving Pittsburgh at the end of July and setting out towards the Portland, Oregon / Vancouver, Washington area. Eventually we want to buy some land to live simply somewhere in the PNW, but we're not ready to do that yet so we're moving to Portland/Vancouver so we can use it as a home base to explore the area and figure out where we want to settle long term.
So I would love to hear any advice you can offer in two basic areas:
- Moving cross country
I've moved a lot, but never so far. Normally I just get local movers and I pack everything up and they drive it across town for me, but clearly that's not going to work in this case ...
I looked into truck rentals and the cheapest we can get is like $2500 ... plus the cost of gas and the fact that you have to drive this giant thing across the country. There's also the fact that we are probably going to stay in an Airbnb the first month, so that we can get the lay of the land and conduct a proper apartment search (and not have to do it, say, over a long weekend visit).
So I guess at this point we are leaning towards basically selling of all our furniture in Pittsburgh so that we don't have to move big things so far. Smaller stuff we can either pull in a travel trailer, or ship via Amtrak or the US Mail or something. We can buy a bed when we get there, and troll Craigslist for the other stuff we need. Basically, with a bed and towels and clothes and kitchen stuff and our laptops, we are basically where we need to be.
But, there's also the possibility of doing one of those Pod or Packrat things, where we just load our stuff in a container and they ship it and store it and bring it to us whenever we want. My concern here is that I don't want to pay for it if we're not going to be able to fill it up.
- Portland/Vancouver
Portland was the first choice, but I started looking at Vancouver when I realized that WA state has no income tax while Oregon has close to 10% (and sometimes more).
Would love to hear about neighborhoods and what to look out for in a good rental. All my rentals thus far have been in NYC and Pittsburgh, and I'm sure things are done a bit differently out there.
We're looking to live in a safe but modest neighborhood. Need a house with 2 bedrooms because we will both be working from home and need to be able to close doors between us when doing so. We're also looking for a decent sized yard. I'd much rather live somewhere that's not hipster central, and just be able to visit hipster central from time to time.
Anyhow, I would love to hear your experiences -- thanks in advance!