Somehow I had decided that it would be cheaper to move ourselves, rather than hiring a moving company. Renting a big truck only cost about $800, three nights of cheap hotels is negligible and how much diesel could we use? Probably not much, right? At the first gas stop I realized the error of my mathematical calculations. Going 2400 miles on ~$300 of fuel would be an average mileage of 32 MGP. Perhaps not extreme… for a motorcycle or something. On the other hand, a big ass diesel moving truck that gets ~8 MPG is going to use *way* more fuel. It turns out that to go ~2375 miles we used 304.75 gallons of diesel and it cost us $1300. That is about 7.78 MPG, paying about $4.27 per gallon. We paid about $1000 for the moving truck and spent probably $300 on hotels and food. I am not sure I want to know if it would have been cheaper to be moved. Of course, we also brought our car on a trailer so that also might make up for some of it.

Originally we had planned on taking 5 days to do the drive, stopping near the end and doing a little bit of touring of some interesting sites in Arizona. Fate was against us as we left about 1.5 days late, so we had to settle for driving through the Mojave Desert. It was reasonably interesting, but not worth doing in a moving truck. We had to drive up some pretty steep hills that would have been nothing in a car, but we were forced to slow down to about 35 MPH (that was floored). We did get there right around sunset, which was pretty neat. After about 15 minutes, we were ready to be done. Unfortunately, we had about an hour or more left to go of scenic Mojave Desert.

So upon removal, we discovered a few things. The installers were not very good, it didn’t meet any sort of code and it was rotting out. Keep in mind, the tub was never, ever used. If it had ever been filled with water it probably would have collapsed through the mounting. The drain in the concrete is in a bit of a weird place, hence the pedestal instead of relocating it (expensive). These are the things I believe we can do to resolve this problem.

1. Replace with similar tub and shower assembly, but do it right. This will involve a reasonable amount of cement removal to relocate the drain to the proper place. It will also cost the most, probably between $5,000 and $6,000. Seems like a lot of money for something we’ll never use, but if it were to increase the sale price of the house or make it sell faster, it could be worth it.
2. Replace with full size shower stall, hopefully with the drain located closer to where the drain is now. In theory, less cement removal should be cheaper, but finding one of these 60″ shower only units is a little harder. Google only found me a couple and none of Lowes/Home Depot didn’t seem to have anything like it. Not sure how much it would cost, it might only be $500 or so cheaper.
3. Don’t replace with a shower or tub, perhaps with a big utility sink instead.

In any of the above cases, we are going to swap the side that the washer and dryer are on so that we can make the bedroom an official bedroom. Since the dryer, heater and water heater all draw air from that bedroom it isn’t legally allowed to be a bedroom. We humans like our oxygen, but so does fire. To solve it, we can flip the washer and dryer into the bathroom, wall (or door) off the heater and water heater and then ventilate the room they are in to the outside (can’t draw combustion air from the garage, gasoline fumes are very inflammable).

The two main benefits should be reliability and speed, the site should now be way faster and should stay up for longer. The server itself is also beefier, with lots of memory and CPUs. To make things even better, it is on a nice and fast connection… unlike my cable modem.

The site itself has adopted the ebony theme for Gallery 2 and the darkcash theme for Wordpress, both fairly customized by myself. There should also be a version of the site for mobile browsers and the iPhone specifically via two different plugins for wordpress. So all you mobile browsers of my site can rejoice. I’m sure there are a few other minor things, but they slip my mind.

That all said, I am still working on the migration and have run into an error or three. I’m still working on the site, sorry.

The place we found is called Birch Creek Apartments. It isn’t a new apartment complex, but it is decent. The grounds are pretty, well manicured and include a few fake streams and such. It isn’t the nicest we looked at, but it is in a great location about 5 miles from Facebook and about 3 miles from a clinic where Mary Ann hopes to get a job. It was one of the largest we found, at about 1060 square feet and it is a 2 bedroom and 2 bathroom, so when anyone comes to visit… they can have their own bathroom. The complex also has a “cabana” which one can rent for $60/night, so if someone visiting doesn’t want to say with us (or is just to many people), they can stay there cheaper than a hotel and be very close. It has a pool too. And it is pet friendly. Our move in date is April 25th, baring any unforeseen issues.

There are a lot of things I am not allowed to talk about, but I believe I can say that the new hire orientation was very sweet. Unlike when I started at any other company, I am basically ready to go by the end of day one. Apparently this is rather new, but after the usual new hire spiel the IT guys showed up with all of our phones and all of our laptops, walked us through getting everything setup and fixed a few problems on the spot.

I got a Mac. Yup, I don’t have a PC. So far, I love it. I’m going to get VMware Fusion so that I can run some windows (rarely) and some Ubuntu.

And the benefits! They have breakfast, lunch and dinner catered! Dry cleaning is free (you pay taxes)! There are other things too, but I can’t recall them at the moment.

I’ve also got a temporary (few months) room about 0.5mi from Facebook, so I am walking to work. Have a look at my room!