Since we started our blog, it has been viewed almost 100,000 times, it's gotten dozens of comments from people interested in moving, and we've received several emails from people planning their move to Seattle.

It's been fun for us to write this blog, but I get the feeling that it's been really helpful for others. It's actually not that uncommon for people to want to move from one part of the country to the other, and Seattle is a popular destination. If you are thinking about or planning to move to Seattle, here are some of the posts we've written that I think are most helpful:

• Cost of Living in Seattle - It is more expensive here than many parts of the country and here's an overview of the differences for us.


• How we chose Seattle - Explains the process we went through to find Seattle - this may be helpful for people looking for their place in the world.


• How to Move to Seattle - Step-by-step guidance on how to move here based on our experience.


• Lessons Learned in Job Searching - Some things that I learned while looking for a job here.

There is also a lot of information scattered across the posts we've written. Some specific labels that may be helpful include:

• differences - Posts about the differences between Texas and Seattle, some may be more applicable to your situation than others.


• observations - Little discoveries and observations about Seattle.


• weather - Our reports and experiences of the local weather conditions and climate.


• urban - Our experiences and information about the city.


• planning to move - All the things we wrote about while trying to get a job and planning to move.


• moving - Posts narrating the actual steps and events of when we moved here.

For people who are interested in moving to Seattle and wondering which of Seattle's neighborhoods is the best fit for them, we explored some of the city's neighborhoods and posted about them:

• Capitol Hill


• First Hill


• Belltown


• Lower Queen Anne


• Fremont


• Ballard


• Wallingford


• U District

Hopefully that's enough to get you started, and feel free to use the search box at the top and links on the left sidebar to look around. If you have any questions, feel free to email Lesley and me.

We went through a long process and did a lot of work in order to move to Seattle and thought that others might be able to benefit from our experiences. Moving can be complicated and there are lots of different ways to do it, but I'm hoping that some guidelines of how to move to Seattle based on our experiences will be helpful to people looking to move to Seattle who find our blog:

1. Decide that Seattle's the best fit for you - Were pretty open-minded when we decided to find somewhere else to live. In order to make a decision, one place to get a lot of insight on a place is Sperling's Best Places, which has lots of informative statistics on US cities, including Seattle. You can compare statistics on Seattle to your hometown or other cities. There's also a forum where people offer their impressions of the city. Every city has its critics, so when reading criticism of Seattle, I had to weigh the negatives of Seattle with the negatives of other areas and consider that many people tend to exaggerate the negatives. We looked at the information and determined that Seattle seemed to fit us best.


2. Be sure you can afford it - How much it will cost you to move depends on how far you're moving from, who does the actual moving work, and how much stuff you have to move. It cost us $3,264 (tax-deductible) for movers to move boxes of our stuff and all our furniture, gas to drive 2,673 miles, and 5 nights of hotel stay. There were also other moving expenses like buying curtains, one-time set up fees for utilities, and things like that. However, the biggest cost for us has been the higher cost of living here. We've written about the cost of living here before, but you may have a different experience depending on where you are moving from. You might save some money if you sell some things to move to a smaller apartment or sell a car to live in the city.


3. Visit the city - Once we thought we might like to live in Seattle, we visited the city, not just as tourists, but as potential residents, shopping for a hometown. We were pretty sure we wanted to move here but visiting a place tells you a lot more than the internet does.


4. Be sure you really want to move here - Get a better understanding of the city to make sure you want to live here. We've shared a lot of our observations of Seattle, comments about the weather, and differences we've noticed between Seattle and Texas, so some of those posts might help you. Some people have contacted me with questions and I usually help as much as I can.


5. Determine to move - Prepare for giving up whatever you're leaving behind. I miss my family and friends, as well some other amenities of Texas. Be honest with yourself about whether you can handle it. It will be a difficult process to move and might not happen unless you're determined to do it. Also, once you've determined to move, you'll want to let people around you know. We could've done a better job of letting people know we were serious about moving. They may try to talk you out of it, but they'll appreciate being given advance notice and plenty of time to adjust to the idea. They may even become excited for you and try to help out.


6. Decide if you need to get a job (or jobs) here before moving - We decided that one of us would have to find a job up here before moving. We didn't want to pay moving expenses without any income and with a higher cost of living, not knowing how long it would take for one of us to find a job. We decided that if one of us found a job up here, we could get by long enough on one income until the other one of us found a job. However, it worked out better than that, as my employer let me work from home up here until I found a job. If you can and want to afford several months without an income, or have income flexibility, then it might be easier to find a job while living here, but we didn't find distance to be an issue in our job searches.


7. Start looking for a job (if you choose to wait, you can do this after step 13 below) - There are a lot of good resources on how to find a job, such as Quintessential Careers. Also, I shared some lessons I learned in my job search, which may be helpful for you. The point I would emphasize is to be patient and know that it may take a while to find a job.
   
   Some people may want to lower their standards for a job to accept pretty much any offer with the goal of moving up here sooner and then plan to find the job they really want as shortly afterward as possible. That's a decision you'll have to make for yourself, but accepting a job that takes you in a different direction than you want to go may make it more difficult for you to get back on track with the job you want and may not look good to others (such as recruiters).


8. Start to think about where you'd like to live - So you know you want to move, but where do you really want to live? In the suburbs or the city? What are your major criteria for choosing an area to live? Safety? Walkability? Schools? We knew for a while that we wanted to live in an urban environment, but we didn't have a specific neighborhood in mind.
   
   Two websites would've been very helpful if they had been available at the time. Firstly, we knew we wanted to live where we could walk places, so one website that would've helped us when looking for a neighborhood is the list of Seattle neighborhoods ranked by WalkScore walkability.
   
   Secondly, Google Maps has a feature called StreetView that lets you see what pretty much any street in the city looks like. We could have used this to look around areas we'd heard of to see what it looked like. Were there old buildings? Residences? Industry?
   
   You also may find our posts on different neighborhoods (e.g. Fremont, Capitol Hill, etc.) to be helpful as well.
   
   Also, my parents got me the Newcomer's Handbook for Moving to and Living in Seattle, which offers a pretty good perspective on all the different neighborhoods.
   
   You may want to start looking for a place to live in any neighborhoods that interest you to see if you can afford to live there.


9. Decide when you want to find a place to live - Do you want to start looking for a house or an apartment once you have a job offer? Are you going to live in a hotel in Seattle until you can find something? Your approach will determine when you should plan to visit Seattle next and how to plan that visit. We figured we'd have to visit Seattle for job interviews at some point and we decided that we would look for apartments during that visit. That worked out pretty well for us, though since we didn't know when we'd get a job offer and be ready to move in, the apartment managers often didn't know if they'd have anything available then.


10. Plan to visit for job interviews - We wanted to do just one more trip to Seattle to do all of our job interviews (hoping at least one of them would result in an offer). When applying to jobs and companies, we mentioned in our cover letter that we would be in town on a certain date range. We didn't have plane tickets yet, but we just chose a date range so that employers could start to plan on it. This way, we were able (well, actually just Lesley) to line up several interviews and have them all on one visit. Lesley was also invited to interview with a few people that may not have interviewed her otherwise just because she was in town and they figured they should interview her while she was there. Alternatively, you could just wait and see what date the employers suggest, but then it may be more difficult to schedule multiple interviews during the same time. Once some employers responded to set up a time, we bought our plane tickets and planned to make a trip out of it.


11. Look for some places to live (if you'll be doing this during your job interview trip, otherwise you can do it at another time) - We wanted to make our trip more productive by looking for places to live. We found it more difficult than expected to look for apartments, especially from a distance and not being able to move in until after we had a job lined up. You may have better luck finding a place to live depending on where and whether you're looking to buy or rent. Also, since then, I've found some better websites for apartment hunting, such as PadMapper and hotpads.com. For buying, Estately.com looks pretty good.
    
    Lesley and I went together on the trip, which was helpful because I could look for apartments while she interviewed. I called apartment leasing offices to schedule visits with any places that appealed to us and took application forms so that we could fill them out and fax them back once we were back in Texas. I just asked my current employer for some vacation time and didn't really go into the details why we were traveling to Seattle. You may want to be honest about it or evasive, but that's your call.


12. Accept a job and plan to move - If your first trip doesn't result in a job offer, just keep working at it. I've found that once I start a job search, it's easier to maintain the momentum than to stop and start over. If you do get a job that you choose to accept, start planning to move.
    
    One major step in this process is finding a mover (unless you're doing it all yourself). Choosing a mover is an unnecessarily complicated process, but we made our way through it. You'll want to choose one of the nationwide moving companies (e.g. Mayflower, Atlas, Bekins, United Van Lines, etc.) but you can't just choose one of them directly, you have to go through their local moving agent, which you can find on the national mover's website. Also beware; don't bother reading any reviews about the national moving company because they're all so negative that you may decide not to move after all. Seriously, though, but you will likely want to look up the moving agent with the Better Business Bureau, and there shouldn't be many negative marks. Then you'll request an estimate from that agent and they'll contact you to set up a time and go through your home to estimate how much all of your stuff will weigh. It's not the most convenient process because you'll also need to be home to go around with the movers and be sure to let them know what you're not planning to bring with you. We posted about our experience choosing a moving company. Moving during the winter is much cheaper than moving during the summer.
    
    The fun part for us was planning our trip up here. Since our movers would take longer to get to Seattle than it would take us to drive, we planned check out as much as we could along the drive up. One thing that we had to consider was that even though we were leaving in late February (which almost feels like spring in Texas), there are a lot of mountains around here and even interstates can get snow enough to require tire chains or be closed.
    
    You could also do this other ways, such as by flying here and having everything, including your car, shipped (though shipping a car is expensive), or selling your car and buying a new one when you get here.


13. Move! - We brought our most important stuff that we didn't want to lose with us and maybe ended bringing a little too much. There are a lot of logistical things to figure out, like what you should take with you, and how you're going to get by in your new home before your stuff arrives. If you're packing your own stuff, pack it all before the movers arrive so they can just load it. Also, pack carefully - we had all the original boxes for our dishes, so nothing was broken. And, we may be more obsessive than some people, but we labeled all boxes with a custom label with our name and address, the room it would go into in our new place, a priority indicating whether it should be loaded first (and unloaded last) based on how soon we'd need to access it after unloading, and a unique number that matched a spreadsheet summarizing what was in each box. Let the movers take as much as possible so that you don't have to take it with you.
    
    Say "goodbye" to everyone you know and have fun on the journey to Seattle. Our trip up here was great. As we approached Seattle, we knew we'd have to buy some stuff (like paper towels and paper plates), so we bought them all on the way in Oregon because there's no sales tax there. It was nice to arrive to our new home and have somewhere to unload all of our stuff from the car, but we had to wait a few days for our furniture to arrive on the mover's truck (this could be a good time to go on a vacation, because dealing without a bed was difficult). We used the time to plan where everything would go so that it wouldn't be too difficult to unpack (though we ended up rearranging everything anyway). If you need to buy anything else, Craigslist is popular here.


14. Immerse yourself - When you get here, go for walks, take the bus, and drive around. Stop in local stores and eat at local restaurants (Seattleites tend to prefer local places over corporate chains). Learning our way around the neighborhood and the city over our first few weeks and experiencing local attractions was my favorite part of moving here.
    
    Also, read and watch the local news. A lot of neighborhoods have their own neighborhood blogs, too. Here are some of my favorite Seattle websites.


15. Stay in contact with home - We shared our blog with people we know and also invested in a webcam so that we could still see other people when talking to them. The telephone and email are fine ways to keep in touch as well, and you may be able to fly back "home" and visit occasionally or have people visit you. Over time, Seattle will stop feeling like a new city and start feeling like your city. And if you end up not liking Seattle, just substitute another city's name for Seattle and repeat this whole process.

Of course there are lots of ways to move, but these are just some guidelines based on our experiences - you may have some different ideas about how to go through this process, and if so, feel free to share them in the comments.

Before we moved here, we thought we might move to Portland instead. We liked both cities and sometimes I wonder what things would be like if we had moved to Portland instead.

We ended up in Seattle because Lesley got a job offer here. I don't know how long it would have taken for each of us to find employment in Portland, but Portland's economy is not as strong as Seattle's.

We've been fortunate here to have met a lot of people at our church and we'd probably miss out on that in Portland.

Lesley loves the view from her office of the Olympic and Cascade Mountain Ranges, including Mount Baker, Elliot Bay, the city skyline, and Lake Union and there just aren't as many landmarks to see in Portland.

Since Portland is a smaller city than Seattle, we'd probably run out of new things to see and do sooner if we lived in Portland. There would definitely be a lot fewer sporting events for us to attend in Portland. Portland has its share of thriving neighborhoods, but I'm not sure if they compare with the vibrancy and character of Seattle's neighborhoods.

On a day-to-day basis, though, I think we would enjoy living in Portland. For one thing, it's easier and more enjoyable to walk in Portland. Portland is flatter than Seattle and has a great public transportation system, with light rail, streetcars, and buses. As I've mentioned, there are a lot of obstacles that make it harder to walk here. Even if we lived elsewhere in Seattle, there are steep hills, busy streets, a freeway, bodies of water, and other stuff that discourages walking.

Another benefit if we lived in Portland is that we would get to see more Cowboys games on local TV instead of only getting to see the Seahawks.

Overall, though, I'm happy living in Seattle. I look forward to visiting Portland more but don't regret not moving there.

We've been doing a lot of talking here, but thought we might open up this thread to questions. Does anyone have any related questions for us, such as about moving, living here, or anything like that?

A few years ago when we first started talking about moving somewhere, we spent a lot of time thinking about where we might want to move to. While it might just seem like we moved as far away from Texas as possible on a whim, a lot of analysis went into choosing Seattle.

At the time, we knew we were bored with D/FW and wanted to live somewhere different, but we didn't really have any preconceptions about where we'd like to live. We both wanted better weather and I wanted to live somewhere I could walk, but we were pretty open to options. So, we decided to look at quite a few of our options, gathering statistics from Sperling's Best Places (bestplaces.net) on 46 different cities. This information was divided into different categories, like population, including city size, and density, race, family (married, single, divorced, etc.), economy (unemployment, job growth, taxes), housing (home cost, rent rate), crime, climate (average temperatures and precipitation), education, transportation and commuting, cost of living, religion (percentage of people in each religion), and voting (democratic, liberal, etc.).

From there, we figured out which stats were most important. Many of the stats we gathered weren't used, but all of this was done in a spreadsheet and most of these stats were weighted slightly and contributed somewhat to our final results. We determined the most important statistics to be the percentage of people commuting by mass transit, the average high temperature in July, the population density, and the temperature comfort index.

From here, since some categories, like temperature, had multiple statistics to consider, whereas we only considered one statistic in the commute mode category, each category was averaged and then weighted individually. The three most important main categories were transportation (mostly including the percentage of people using mass transit), health/climate (mostly focusing on climate), and people (including density - the higher the better - and size - the more the better).

The point of all this wasn't to have the numbers tell us which city to move to, but to guide us in identifying some potential cities that we might like. We tinkered with our weights for each category a few times, but one of our top eleven lists included:

1. San Francisco
   
2. Washington DC
   
3. Boston
   
4. New York
   
5. Philadelphia
   
6. Chicago
   
7. Seattle
   
8. Newark
   
9. Pittsburgh
   
10. Oakland
    
11. Portland

For what it's worth, Dallas appeared 20th in our list and Fort Worth appeared 44th.

It's kind of interesting that Seattle was 7th on our list but we moved there anyway. However, we looked at each city individually to see if there was anything that might be significant enough to rule it out. For example, while San Francisco rated very well in transportation, climate, and city size/density, its high cost of living and secular culture (while not weighted heavily by us) were undesirable enough to make us want to look down the list. Boston might have been nice, too, but the cold winters ruled it out.

All of these other highly-ranked cities had significant flaws. We looked at the lowest-rated categories of each city, and it turned out that Seattle was rated well in every category. Whereas San Francisco's cost of living earned a 25% in our arcane rating system and Pittsburgh's economy/crime earned a 16%, for example, the lowest rated thing in Seattle was 52%, which was for the cost of living. So, there wasn't really anything to push us away from Seattle. It's size and density weren't as high as I would've liked and the percentage of people using public transportation was second lowest in our top 10, but our statistics combined with the details we'd read about online, including the many things to do outdoors and the scenery made Seattle sound like a good fit. When we visited in Seattle, we both liked it in a way that we hadn't liked any other city. Since Portland also appeared somewhat high on our list (it was hurt mostly by its small size), we visited there too, since it was near Seattle, and really liked it as well. After this, we had made up our minds to move to one or the other.

While there may have been some flaws in our analysis, we think looking at the details first really helped us to find a livable home city that we really enjoy. So far what our research told us has been true, and thinking about the other options that appeared, I don't think there's anywhere I'd rather be right now.

About two years ago we visited Seattle for the first time. We had already started talking about wanting to live in another city someday and we thought that we might like to live in either Seattle or Portland. I wrote a few posts about our trip on my old blog. You can click here to read about what we did in Seattle the first time we visited. Anyway, it's kind of interesting that back then we were talking about moving and that I wanted to move to Portland and Lesley wanted to move to Seattle. In this post, I talked about what we were looking for in a city, including the same things we like about Seattle now:

We’d like to live in a large city milder weather than we have in Texas. I’d like to live somewhere where I don’t have to take a car to get everywhere and where I can spend more time outdoors. We thought Seattle and Portland might be two cities that would fit our interests, so we wanted to visit to get a better feel for the cities and evaluate the things that statistics don’t indicate. After visiting, I can say that both Seattle and Portland seem to do a better job of having what we want than do Dallas or Fort Worth.

So far, I don't have any regrets over living here instead of Portland, though I do wonder what it would have been like. It's interesting to look back on our thought processes on moving and the steps we took toward moving here. It's kind of neat that we both kind of knew what we wanted and were able to move here.

Here's a video that was taken a few days before the movers came to take our stuff. We had over 55 boxes of stuff, which is still way less than what most people have. It took a long time and a lot of work to pack everything and the apartment was a big mess for a month. Anyway, enjoy the video of our old apartment, it was a good first apartment.

Here's our next video. This is me packing our computer at our old apartment. I had to cut some Styrofoam with a saw to get it to fit snugly into the box and it was quite a mess. We had several large, fragile items to put in boxes, and fortunately Lesley's parents gave us some boxes to use, so then I had to figure out how to fit everything and how to put the Styrofoam around it. The saw that my dad gave me came in handy, but it made a big mess and the Styrofoam particles stuck to everything. Also, Lesley thought you should know that the quiet music in the background is from Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade.

Here's a video of Lesley cleaning our old apartment. Look at how fast she cleans!

It's very strange to think that today was the last time we'll be in Texas for a while. I've lived in a few different places, but all in D/FW. It's hard to comprehend that I'll be calling somewhere else "home." Everyone I know and so many memories and experiences I've had were in Texas. You could say that I'm leaving it all behind, but that's not really how I feel. It's not really an abandonment, it's just a change. I won't physically be in Texas, but it will continue to live in me. While our 2,600 mile relocation is a big deal in a lot of ways - a significant change in physical location, surroundings, and proximity to others - it's really not that big of a change in others - I'll still be the same person I've always been and will stay close to my family and friends even if I'm not physically close. This is a big journey ahead of us, not just the six days of driving, but living in a totally different environment. While I don't exactly know what to expect from this and how it will change us, I think this will be a significant positive influence on my life and I'm ready to discover the new things and changes along the way.

It's been a challenge to plan the logistics for these days leading up to our move. We wanted to pack as much as possible for the movers to take but at the same time make sure we had enough to get by. Figuring out how many towels we'd need and what toiletries to keep has been a little difficult, especially considering that we've been trying to minimize what we take with us since our car is going to be packed. Fortunately, I think we planned pretty well and we should be able to fit everything in the car without too much trouble. There are a couple bags of things that I wish we had let the movers take, and we ended up with an extra CD that won't fit in the CD wallet. But, those are the biggest problems to date, aside from having to pay for the movers to bring a smaller truck this morning, which meant that overall things are going well. Soon we're going to unplug our modem, pack our computer, and get ready to leave as early as possible tomorrow.

We've had our trip planned out and reserved for a few weeks and we've been pretty excited about it. However, since we're driving pretty far north during winter, we knew that weather could be an issue. Even though the weather along our route has looked pretty good for the past few weeks, unfortunately it looks like a winter storm is going to move into Lake Tahoe right before we were planning to get there. So, while I don't know how much snow will accumulate or whether road conditions will be that bad, we decided to alter our route. While we were really looking forward to seeing Lake Tahoe, we figured that it would be better not to risk driving through bad road conditions and getting delayed or sliding off the road. So, I've already canceled our hotel and booked another one farther west. This new route won't take much longer and it shouldn't be as risky, so I'm glad I was able to take care of that. I'm ready to get on the road.

We've spent all weekend cleaning up our apartment and putting everything into boxes and before that we spent some time for the past couple weeks putting stuff we didn't use into boxes. I can't really estimate how long it's taken to do all of this work, but it's been our top priority for a while. And we only have a one bedroom apartment. I can't imagine how much work it would be to move if we had a larger place or more people in the household. Well, we finished everything last night and were ready for the movers to arrive this morning and take everything away. They arrived when they said they would and after figuring out how to maneuver their 18-wheeler to our apartment, apartment management came out and told them that their 18-wheeler wasn't allowed. Apparently, even though there is enough room for a big rig, sometimes they run over the curbs and damage the sprinkler or damage the gates, so the apartments don't allow them. So, one of the movers had to drive all the way back, like 20 miles, to their warehouse to get a smaller truck. Anyway, after they get everything loaded, hopefully all our stuff will arrive when they say it will, then we'll have the time consuming but more fun task of unpacking everything.

Well, after months of talk and planning, our move date is almost here. We pretty much have all of our packing done and are ready for our stuff to be picked up tomorrow. I wish we could leave now, but we have to wait for the movers and then we're spending one last night here (rather than paying for a hotel) before we drive off on Tuesday. It's been kind of a hassle spending all weekend packing everything, even though we don't have that much stuff, I wish we had even less. Thankfully, Lesley's parents helped us pack and clean a little bit today.

Now that we have all of these boxes in our apartment and have said goodbye to our parents, moving across the country sounds like a bigger deal than ever. But, while it's a lot of work and going to be a big change, I'm ready to go.

My parents visited us in Irving today for the last time. Fortunately, they were in a good mood and I had a good time having lunch with them. I'll still stay pretty close to my parents by phone, email, and internet, so moving away shouldn't be too big of a deal, but after living my entire life no more than 50 miles away from them, it's kind of a big deal moving almost 50 times farther away.

Yesterday was my last day in the office. I haven't really thought about it much, but it's going to be weird not to come into work for a while. I haven't made a big deal out of it at work, a few people have talked to me about it, but since I'm still going to be working for the same company and I'll be traveling into the office sometime again, I don't want to treat it as too big of a deal. Still, as I looked at my desk for the last time, I realized that I'm going to miss some of my coworkers and it will definitely be different working from home.

I dropped off my car last weekend for my dad to help sell. We washed it and cleaned it up well inside. I didn't really want to sell it because after almost 5 years of ownership I had grown pretty fond of it. But, taking two cars with us to Seattle just isn't practical, so we had to get rid of one of them and mine was older, so that's the one we chose to get rid of. Thankfully, my dad did all the work to sell it and now it's gone, but it was a good car.

Well, today was my last day at my job... I'm definitely going to miss all my co-workers. I guess when some doors close, others open. They always do. I plan to try to keep in touch with them and send pictures. I only worked there for 8 or 9 months, but in that short time, I feel like I made pretty good friendships that could possibly stand the test of distance and time. Maybe I'll see them again some day...

We've gone ahead and set up our phone and internet. Qwest is the local provider we chose to use and their website was so easy to use. Plus, we had questions about whether we could change our service later and when our equipment arrived, and there was a very easy to use online chat feature which allowed us to get our questions easily answered by a real person. We may end up dropping our phone service and upgrading our internet later, but it seems like it will be easy to do that, given our first positive experience with Qwest.

We're leaving two weeks from today, and in less than three weeks from today we'll be settling down in our new home. Right now all the talk and thinking about moving is exciting and it sounds pretty cool, but I'm pretty unprepared for how radically our lives are going to change. I have only 8 days left at work locally, but that just hasn't been entering my mind much, I've just been doing my job as if nothing's going to change. And, as I see it, I don't think that much will change, but it will definitely change, I'm just not sure how. In fact, our whole lives will change a lot, in many ways that I have hardly begun to comprehend. Change doesn't really bother me, though, stuff just changes and it's fine. I'm sure in a couple months I'll be used to living up there and I'll look back at my time in Texas and realize how totally different it was.