Here’s Exactly What I Spent to Move into My New Home (Including 3 AC Units!)

I’ve always dreamed of owning a classic Chicago bungalow, and now I finally have one. My husband and I purchased a 1922 home in the city’s bungalow belt, and just finished moving in a few days ago. We didn’t have a budget set for the move — instead we focused on buying the house itself. 

Because purchases can quickly add up when you’re moving, I wanted to see how much it actually cost us. So I kept a list of all the running costs in the Notes app on my phone. For context, this was a short-distance move about a 30-minute drive from our old place to our new one. Here’s everything we had to buy to make it happen.

Our total costs for the move came out to $2,655. Let’s dive a bit deeper into each expense.

The biggest expense here was for tape. We spent $10 on boxes and packaging paper, and $30 on rolls of tape. Chicago has a Facebook chat group called Box Dibs, where anyone who needs boxes or has some to offer posts their zip code — and you can get free boxes. People nearby call dibs on those boxes, and then you arrange a porch pickup.

Aside from a few boxes we had to buy at The Home Depot and Lowes, all our boxes and packing paper were completely free. We went through tape much quicker than boxes, but you can save money by reusing the cutter casing packing tape comes in, and just buy the rolls without the cutters.

I won’t lie — this is the most efficient and inexpensive professional moving company I’ve ever used in my life, and I’ve moved a lot. And they were fabulous. Nothing broken, everything wrapped and handled with care. It took four hours for them to pack up the truck (even with some things that weren’t fully in boxes), bring it to our new home 30 minutes away, and unpack everything. The company is a small family business, so I think that might have something to do with it.

Any time you buy a new home, the first thing you should do is change all the locks. People may still have keys to your house, and if the previous owners come back and try to get in that could be problematic (to say the least). So we bought two digital keypad locks ($150 each) and a video doorbell ($120). We will eventually install a security camera on the garage looking into the alley, but that’s lower on the priority list, as the neighbors across the alley have floodlights and their own camera.

I think when they listed the house, the sellers decided to no longer do upkeep on the lawn. When we did our final walkthrough, the grass was pretty tall and all the hedges and bushes were overgrown and in the way of the sidewalk. My tiny dog loved hopping through the tall grass, but I certainly did not. So I hired a landscaper to do a full spring cleanup. I found him through the new neighborhood’s Facebook group, so he thankfully gave me a pretty big discount.

Our new home is more than 100 years old — which means it wasn’t built for central air. The previous owners didn’t install any, either. They just used window AC units, which they mostly took with them when they moved, except for one. Something you wouldn’t know about me is that I hate the heat. I overheat easily, I take medication that makes me sweat when I’m warm, and I avoid the sunlight because I don’t like being hot. So window AC units are a must for me — at least until we upgrade to a central air system ideally next year. We bought three at $300 each: one to replace the old one the previous owners left, one for my office, and one for the bedroom.

As is custom for most people on moving day, we did not cook so we spent $25 on a pizza for dinner.

Ultimately, because the movers were so cheap, it enabled us to buy a lot of these items that we could have either done without or done ourselves. Although if you want to talk about all the costs of repairing the decaying electricity and plumbing in a house that’s more than a century old, that’s a story for another day.

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