Finally Out

It’s official.  Kris’s dad is no longer a resident at The Arboretum.  I took a half a day of vacation so we could rent a moving truck and get all of his things moved out of his apartment, and what an ordeal!!!  I had reserved my truck from noon until 4:00.  The U-Haul rental place took forever to get the truck to me, even though I had reserved it, and had the reservation/paperwork in hand when I showed up.  So we didn’t even get there until almost 12:30.  Then we had to go see the director so Kris could sign some forms, where we learned that they would be keeping her dad’s $6000 deposit because it was a “short notice vacation” of the apartment.  Well, had we known that I would have been tempted to tell them, OK, here is our 30 day notice and we will move him out at the end of November.  Unfortunately, they never told us that when we moved him there, or when we transitioned him into the Wisconsin Family Care program, so we were sort of out of luck.  I should have expected that though, based on the fact that they wanted us to pre-pay two months in advance when we transitioned him in the first place.  And then harped about it when we did actually move him to Family Care, because as I understand it, they are not allowed to charge as much as they would if someone was paying privately.  So go figure that they would figure out a way to screw him out of more of his money.

We didn’t have a lot of stuff to move, but we had enough.  It was mainly his bed, a couch, his lift chair (which we just purchased for him coincidentally), a dresser, and a couple of end tables.  The remaining stuff was boxes of clothes and pictures.  The bed and dresser are actually very good, well-made, quality pieces.  They are probably in the neighborhood of 40 years old (probably a little older), but are still in very good shape that we may see about having refinished.

We got everything loaded up in about 4 hours, so we were out by around 5:00.  We stopped at home first to drop off a few things that we wanted to have easily on-hand in the event we needed it (such as some of his clothes) but the rest then went over to the storage locker.  We had finished up and were back to drop off the U-Haul by around 6:00.  The kid behind the counter gave me some grief about having it back late.  Gee, no kidding.  I was hoping to have everything moved within a four hour window, but unfortunately that didn’t happen.  If I had been able to get it for six hours I would have probably done that.   Unfortunately, that wasn’t an option.  Thanks U-Haul (insert sarcastic voice).  I just have not had good experiences with U-Haul.  Period.  Even the one “good” experience I had turned into a not so good one because I had to drive all the way to the east side of Milwaukee to get a trailer because the local drop off place in Germantown did not have the size trailer we needed and wouldn’t have someone drive one out.  Maybe next time I should look into renting a trailer or truck from a competitor and see how that goes.