The small costs of shifting house adds up to a large expense

We are now in the full swing of packing our house into many, many boxes and preparing ourselves for the move. I have shifted a number of times, and each time I am amazed how much it cost to shift. I have previously written about moving houses, outlining a few options. I think it is the little things that that adds up to a large amount. Let see what we have been hit for so far.

1. $30 - Fee at the local rubbish tip for disposing of items that we haven't used in a number of years.
2. $300 - Removalist to help shift the furniture. I previously wrote that we might be doing the removalist thing ourself, but we really ran out of time as our son became quite ill during the last week of packing. So to play it safe, we thought of hiring some removalist to do the shifting.
3. $570 - Renting our old house for three weeks while we wait for the our new house to be settled. This worked out quite well as there isn't a high pressure to shift out as soon as our house is sold. But I think that three weeks is too long. Next time, I will go for one week instead.
   
4. $30 - The cost of redirecting our mail to the new address. Although we will tell everyone necessary that we have moved and what our new address is, there will always be someone who misses out. So a mail redirection service is essential. We have opted for the three month service. This should be long enough to capture all mail.
5. $50 - Insurance for the transport of our belongings to the new house. The removalist that we are using only has insurance if he has accident and is the truck is write-off. My wife and I though that some of stuff could be damage with a small accident. So we are getting some insurance for the delivery.
6. $75 - boxes, tape and packing paper. The boxes are not cheap. We have tried many source of boxes, and have found the cheapest one to be about $3 per box. We have also managed to get some boxes from friends, the local shop and have some boxes left from the previous move. We need about 30 boxes of various sizes.
7. $75 - eating out and take away. Since we are trying to eat all the food in the fridge before moving, we have also eating quite a few take away.
   

So far that is a total of $1460. There will be more expenses to come as we move into the house, such as cutting the new keys, migrating our ADSL internet service to the new phone line and connecting fee for all the utilities. I am not looking forward towards these fees coming in.

photo credit: Ove Tøpfer