Well, there’s no going back at this point. As of today, March 31st we have officially shut the doors on our Oakland residence. For the next 4 months we’ll be living in the guest house of some good friends of ours in Walnut Creek.
The decision to move out of our studio several months early was largely a financial one. Though we will continue to work until we leave, we will be significantly scaling back the number and the size of projects that we take on. At this point we’re mostly wrapping up existing work and only taking on short 1 to 2-month projects. Since we’ll be bringing in a fraction of our standard income, it didn’t make sense to continue paying our standard monthly rents.
The move has gone smoothly, though we significantly underestimated the amount of time it would take us to pack up and move everything out, which led to a last minute push of three 16 hour days (literally) of packing and boxing.
Everything we own was divided into three categories:
1. To Olive-Route Press: Anjel will be setting up a temporary office in a small letterpress / design shop in Berkeley run by a good friend of ours. This category consisted of Anjel’s work supplies and the bulk of the design reference books we’ve accumulated over the past few years – a couple bookcases worth.
2. To Walnut Creek: This will be our temporary residence and the things we’re bringing there include everything we expect to need over the next four months; mostly clothing, kitchen supplies, pets, etc… In addition it includes all of my work supplies as I will be setting up my temporary office in the guest house. This will be the first time that our firm has worked from separate locations, and the first time in 5 years that Anjel has had to commute to work.
3. To Tacoma: Anjel’s mother lives in Tacoma, Washington and has a giant, largely-unused basement where she has been generous enough to let us store the bulk of our stuff while we’re gone. This includes mostly furniture, 20-some-odd boxes of books, business papers and clothing. It seems elaborate to load up a U-Haul and drive everything up to Tacoma (~800 miles away), but even when factoring in round-trip traveling costs, it was still cheaper to store everything up there than to rent a storage locker for 18 months. Plus, that route sends us past a good friend living in Salem and my sister in Portland and allowed us to make a bit of an adventure out of it.
Aside from 2 or 3 pickup-truck loads we brought to Berkeley and Walnut Creek the past few days, when we rolled out of Oakland around 7:00 the 16′ rental truck contained everything we owned and was absolutely packed to the gills. If we weren’t over the recommended weight limit, we were certainly close. The truck lumbered and swayed down the road until we got onto the freeway, at which point I settled into the slow lane at a comfortable 50 to 55 miles per hour and headed for Walnut Creek.
We made it without much trouble, unloaded the boxes and supplies that will be staying here, re-secured the rest and will be heading out bright and early tomorrow morning to make the run up to Salem.
