the tofu house

Other than packing our items from our old place, moving day was one of our largest headaches. We’re sure this is the same for many other home owners.

The most straightforward way was to engage a moving company to settle everything, but we found their services rather expensive. Most moving services cost around S$300 and above, which was not worth the cost as they were not moving a lot of bulky furniture.

In the end, we settled on booking a manual van via Tribecar. Tofu G has a license that allows him to drive vans, and the van was big enough to fit all of our bulkier items. This includes our Secretlab chairs, guitars, cameras etc.!

Tofu V was initially skeptical of this decision as Tofu G was (obviously) not accustomed to driving a van – to add on, a manual van! However, everything actually turned out smoother than she had expected.

Tribecar booking cost breakdown

• S$100: Security Deposit (refundable upon termination of account)
• S$70: 8 hours Manual Van rental with TribeShield & Personal Accident Insurance (this is rounded up)
• S$70: Diesel (Tofu G pumped way too much diesel and gifted half tank to the next user 🥲)
• Family labour cost not included

Our total calculable cost came up to S$240. This is slightly lower than what professional companies would have charged us. If we had pumped slightly less petrol, the savings we’re looking at is about S$100+.

Was it worth the savings to book Tribecar and move house on our own?

Tofu G says yes, and he remains convinced that it was a wise decision to do the move on our own.

Tofu V is on the fence for this. There were savings, yes, but they weren’t particularly significant. In addition, we ended up having to get a lot of help from our families to help us pack our items, load & unload from the van, and then move everything up by ourselves to our new house.

We were very lucky that:

1. We had help at no charge, although it did cost us one whole day and a few people to move our items.
2. Tofu G had a license that allows him to drive manual vans. This allowed him to not only book a van but a manual one, which is much cheaper than auto.

If you happen to have both of the above criteria met and don’t mind the backbreaking work then we’ll say go for it… otherwise just pay a bit more for professional help instead!