OK. Thanks. I think I will do what you did and trust the movers and their storage facility. I’m going to take as little as possible to the townhouse and just “rough it” with the dogs for a few months.

Please make sure you are using reputable movers and not a moving broker. One thing to keep in mind is that a reputable mover will actually come to your home and give you a written estimate and a contract. A moving broker won't - they will tell you they can estimate it over the net or over the phone. There is a tremendous amount of fraud in the moving industry. Make sure you get recommendations from people that have recently moved and used a reputable mover. Even your Realtor can give you a mover or two that is reputable. Please do your due diligence and don't be fooled by similarly named companies. https://www.movingscam.com/

^^^ Agree entirely. We had a real, locally-based moving company, with warehouse/storage on their own site. They came to the house and looked at everything, did a written estimate (by email), we signed a contract and we insured for both the move to the warehouse, the storage in it and the move interstate once we were ready. No glitches at all and as it happens, no damage worth claiming on. We did check out their storage facility, BTW.

I’m using the local affiliate for North American Van lines. They did a walk-through of the house and gave me an estimate. I was a little shocked at the final estimate but whatever. For a couple thousand I have peace of mind.

We got a couple of those POD things for our move, since we had to put our stuff somewhere in order for the stager's furniture to be brought into the house we were selling, and then once it sold we called up the place where our PODs were stored in climate control and let them know when we wanted them to have our PODs delivered at the new house which was all the way across the country. :P I didn't really like the fact that once you'd passed the first week of a month, you had to pay for a whole month in storage, even if you only needed...say...three weeks. But it was convenient, they brought the empty pods out and picked them up once we'd packed them, they kept everything safe and delivered them as promised 3 days after we'd completed the move and gotten off the plane in our new city. Expensive, but convenient and prompt. :P