Moving Our Family Down South
This summer, we moved our family from NY to Charleston, SC for a job opportunity
Moving to a new state is tough, and moving with toddlers is even tougher! Here's a run down on selecting a town, hiring a moving truck, planning the route, finding both short term and long term housing, and more.
If you've been following my Instagram, then you know we just recently relocated our family from Rochester, New York to the beautiful city of Charleston, South Carolina! We fell in love with the southern charm and proximity to the beach. Our entire goal of moving down south was to raise our triplet toddlers in a place where we can spend the majority of our days outside. And that golf cart, master planned community, and boat lifestyle didn't hurt either!
In all we spent over a year planning our move, and we learned a lot along the way. If you're looking to move your family to a new area, use this list as a resource to help you along the way!
Selecting a town/area
Once we decided that Charleston was the place for us, arguably the hardest decision was deciding where exactly we wanted to buy a house. Just like most cities, there are different towns all over the area with varying school districts, traffic levels, access to shopping, and so on. We knew that our number one goal was finding a family friendly area where we would want to live long term to raise our girls, so we came on a family vacation and explored the area. We loved towns like Mount Pleasant and James Island, but we couldn't afford the quality of life there that we were looking for. We quickly created a shortlist based on location and value:
John's Island
Positives: Gorgeous scenery, and even home to the famous Angel Oak tree. Close proximity to Kiawah Island, with quiet and beautiful beaches. Multiple new build communities with gorgeous amenities right in our price range.
Negatives: More remote than we were looking for - you have to leave the island to find big name stores. With only one lane on and off of the island, traffic is infamously bad here. The school district on one side of the island is well known, while the district on the other side of the island where the new construction neighborhoods lie is in rough shape.
West Ashley
Positives: Close proximity to downtown Charleston. Great school districts. Big beautiful older brick homes in our price range.
Negatives: Older homes mean more renovations, and after renovating our first 3 homes from top to bottom, we were looking for something more move in ready.
Summerville
Positives: More bang for your buck with houses, top notch school district, a ton of new build communities, and it's own thriving shopping/restaurant district.
Negative: 25+ miles from downtown Charleston and beaches, but new build communities with direct access right off the highway.
After weighing the options, we decided Summerville was the place for our family!
Buying a house
Once we decided on an area, we knew that we wanted to build a new construction versus a preowned home. We did a TON of research on the builders and communities in the Charleston/Summerville area. This could be it's own blog post entirely, but I'll try and scale it back to the basics.
They do a great job in each community of setting up model homes in the same area so that you can easily tour multiple builders in the same day. We looked specifically for Summerville communities with the works - resort style pools, food truck Fridays, dinning, shopping, and schools right on site. Our top 3 choices were:
Carnes Crossroads is a thoughtfully planned, traditional community
Nexton was recently named the Best Master Planned Community in the U.S.
Cane Bay Plantation is the top-selling community in South Carolina for years
Here we found everything from high end builders like Homes By Dickerson and Toll Brothers, to more basic homes like Centex and TrueHomes. The major builders we considered were right in the middle in terms of affordability and customized style and included Pulte, Lennar, and our choice of David Weekley Homes, but you could spend all day finding more builders in the area and throughout each community.
Here's where it got tricky. We ended up signing on a new construction while on vacation in May 2021. At the time, we were very seriously considering Pulte Homes, but were disappointed to find that they were only releasing 1-2 lots per month, and opening the land to crazy bidding wars sometimes selling far over list price! Another issue was that many of the lots in these neighborhoods are in the interior, where a small alleyway leads to your detached garage, leaving little room for a yard. One more thing to keep in mind when building a new construction is that the price of the land is not included in the build price. In our case, the interior lots with alley parking started at $12,000, and the larger exterior lots with full yards started at $45,000. But in a bidding war, these prices were going far and above, and with all offers needing to be best and final, we'd have no idea how many other people were even bidding.
We knew we wanted a large yard on the outer ring of the neighborhood, and didn't want to engage in a bidding war. We walked into the model home for David Weekley Homes not knowing much about the builder, and told them what we were looking for: a large exterior lot with a traditional driveway (not alley), 4 bedrooms including one guest bed downstairs with a full bath for visitors, a front office, upstairs rec room, and we told them our price point. As luck had it, they had a lot matching all of our requests that was becoming available within the week. After our sales agent pulled a few strings, we were able to secure it on the spot!
The only issue - that was May, and now it's October and we still don't have a closing date! The new construction market is crazy with delays across the board for things like windows, flooring, appliances, and so on. We are hoping to be in before the holidays, but we won't know for sure until our builder locks everything in. Although our move in date is still up in the air, we were still happy to be under contract before the move itself, as house hunting was one less thing to worry about when we arrived!
Hiring a moving truck
Back to the move itself: there are a ton of options when searching for moving trucks. You can hire a big brand company, a lesser known moving company, or rent the truck and drive it yourself. Initially we got quotes from both types of moving companies - to move our 4 bed house ran about $6,000 with one of the no name companies, and over $12,000 with a big brand like Mayflower.
After doing our research online, we learned that the smaller companies were often notorious for hidden fees, lost and damaged items, and extremely late deliveries. This, of course, isn't going to be true across the board. But after hearing first hand from a friend who experienced all of the above on her cross country move from California to NY, we decided to rent a truck from U-Haul and drive it ourselves. This ended up costing just around $4,000 for a week long rental, with Sam driving the truck, and me driving the girls in our van.
We ended up renting the 26 foot truck with an additional 6' x 12' foot trailer towed behind - which is the largest set up you can rent without a special license. It just barely fit everything! But we were happy we didn't need to leave anything behind. Sam thought for sure he would be moving slower than us, but I'm here to set the record straight that it DOES take longer to drive with three toddlers than it does to drive a 26 foot moving truck! Hah.
We did splurge around $500 on each end to pack and unpack the truck itself - in Rochester we found fighters through Facebook who work as movers on their days off, and in Charleston we found a company called UniMovers employed by college kids. Highly recommended all around!
Planning the route
During our previous summer vacation trip to Charleston, we had one amazing experience driving straight through the night on the way down, and one absolutely nightmare of an experience going all night on the way back. This time we decided to split the difference and stop halfway at an Airbnb. The halfway point fell around the DC area, but we knew we needed something less metropolitan so that we could park the moving truck.
We found this adorable tiny home/log cabin/farmhouse/loft in the Richmond area on Airbnb. Yes, you read that right - this place was adorable! There was a massive yard with fire pit, wild horses across the fenced area, roosters calling in the morning, and plenty of sleeping space for the 6 of us within its 600 square feet. The house was right off the major highway so it was so easy to stop for the night and not lose any ground on our drive, and the 30 acres of land meant we didn't need to worry about finding a safe spot to park the U-Haul for the night.
Finding a short term rental
With our move happening September 1, and our house not being completed until the new year (ish) the hunt for a rental began. This proved to be yet another rabbit hole of information. We considered a few different options:
Apartment complexes
There are a ton of brand new complexes located right within the same communities we were looking to build within. This means beautiful amenities and jumping right into the life we were moving down for. I found multiple apartment complexes offering as low as 3 month leases, however the monthly rent was SO high, in many cases it was actually cheaper to sign a 6 month lease even if we only intended to live there for 3 months. 3 bedroom apartments that typically rented for $1800/mo cost around $4.500/mo or more for a short term lease. This coupled with having 3 toddlers and shared walls made us decide against this option.
Long-term Airbnbs
Airbnb was a great option if we knew we only needed a spot for 1-2 months, however with cleaning costs and service fees we ran into the same problems with extremely high costs. Plus, if our build date went over schedule, there was no guarantee the Airbnb rental would be available last minute to extend the date, which would mean moving twice before getting into our house.
Homes for rent
Ultimately we decided to rent an entire house for the convenience and space. We rented through FirstKey Homes which is a national rental company. They have a ton of inventory, but the market is so crazy houses are snatched up as soon as they come on the market, so we had to rent our house sight unseen from New York. By unseen I mean they didn't even have pictures yet! But it's located in a nice community so we felt comfortable taking the leap. I won't say this has been the best rental experience - it has proven to be very difficult to contact management since moving in. However, FirstKey was the one and only company who allows tenants to break the lease (for a fee of 2 months rent) as compared to other companies who did not allow for a lease break or subletting and only signed 12 month leases. It's comfortable, temporary, and just a golf cart ride away from our new construction, so we're happy!
All of the research, planning, and logistics were well worth the end results, and we learned a ton along the way! The main takeaway I've found is that it's possible to move a family out of state on a budget - but you have to be strategic about where your money is best spent. Between moving costs, fees to break a lease, bidding wars, and the constant struggle between time vs money, I hope this list can help someone else start to piece together the blueprint to make a move like this possible for their family.
Want to learn more about Charleston? Read our full blog here:
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