Advice for building a new house and moving contents

[Basara]

Another thread in U.Hall about people losing stuff in the process has made me think that perhaps a post here might be good to help others avoid common mistakes.This is primarily for moving/resizing without changing shards.

Much of this is taken from my replies in other threads.

Step 1: Location

When moving, it's not always a long move. Sometimes, it's just tearing down the old house and building a new one, or placing a larger house where your neighbor just dropped his old one.

Each of these provides its own benefits and drawbacks.

1. Same area, Different plot: This is the easiest type of move, and any character can manage this. As you have several days before the old house falls, you just load up yourself and your giant beetle (and packies if a low-spawn area non-Fel area), and just make the round trips. Even if in Fel, you can often avoid undue attention from potentially hostile neighbors if you walk the trip, instead of recalls/gates that let everyone in earshot know you're arriving or departing. If your neighbors are the reason you're leaving, you might end up moving everything you can via stealther without any pack animals. A special subtype of this is where you are moving to the EXACT neighboring spot, which even makes vendor moves (like bod storage for a crafter) a breeze. Set up the vendors in the new house near as you can to the old one, open one vendor in each house, and pull stuff off one, put it in your pack, then move it to the new one (it was once even easier when you could move stuff between your vendors without repricing them).
2. Long-distance moves: This is the next easiest, as it's just a matter of scale of transit. Have both houses set up, and shuffle stuff between them. For quicker moves, you might want to use a bonded beetle and 2 bonded pack animals, or if a mage, 5 pack animals and using the gate spell. Of course, even though you only have 4 stable slots on a non-tamer, you can actually have 5 bonded pack animals (and do everything with recall or sacred journey) with a little preparation (a week before you build the new house, preferably on a lesser-used character, get 5 pack animals, feed them, then log out with them in your house or the inn. After a week, log back in and feed them to bond. You don't HAVE to have any of them stabled to bond, it's just that most people are too busy with other things to have all their pet slots filled with pack animals that they can't stable all of - but a dedicated lumberjacker might find this very useful).
3. Resizing: This is where most people have trouble, as they don't have a place (at least, they think so) to put all their stuff while they move, and dropping the house has been known to cause stuff to disappear that was left on the ground. However, there are things people do for other reasons (packing up to temporarily leave the game, or shard transfers) that can also be used to make this relatively pain-free.

Step 2: How to pack up for a Resize:

1. If you have multiple accounts with houses on the shard, move everything you can to the other houses. Duh.
2. As long as you're not on SP or Mugen, you'll have 5-7 character slots - use them.
(The following applies to ALL your characters on the shard, so if you only have 1 house on that shard shared by three accounts, then load up ALL THREE sets of characters).

• Don't forget to redeed all the add-ons.
• Get all your heavy stacks of items either deeded, or into a character's bank, and consolidate as many stacks of live items as possible (including consolidating ALL the characters' gold into 1 million checks, with the remainder divided into 1 gold stack per character for stable fees, and a check for anything left over. Assuming each character has 50 items in the bank on average, that will give you your 375-700 (depending on # characters and if your bank box has the storage expansion) - perhaps even approaching 1000 items for 7 characters that are mostly empty. This is where having a a commodity deed box is vital.
• FULLY DRESS each character, even if it's with gear they normally wouldn't use. Your crafter mule may not have a need for your cleanup commemorative t-shirt collection, spare CC, hooded shroud of shadows and Ranger cloak, but wearing them will be each one inventory item more you can carry. For purposes of the move, it's better to have a book/weapon & shield in hand, than a bow or other 2-handed weapon.
• Now, load each of your character's packs (other than the house placer) up with your most valuable light items, so that you do not go overweight, and get as close as possible to 125 items.
• Count your remaining items, and compare them to your number of character slots. If you have less than 125 items per character left, and the combined weight is under 1600 per character, you should be able to use 1 Giant Beetle (being ridden) per character for completely safe storage. If you exceed that amount by less than 250 items or 3200 weight, then the character doing the resize will need two pack animals PLUS a giant beetle. If you exceed it by 250-500 items or 3200-6400 weight, then the person doing the resize needs to not use a beetle, and use 5 pack animals, instead.
• Given that all the steps above should be 1500+ items on characters (and banks), and 625-875 in beetles (or as high as 1275 if the resizing character uses 5 pack horses or llamas instead of a beetle), it is unlikely that any move short of a keep being replaced by a castle will require more storage than this.

3. So, you're a hoarder (options if even the above isn't enough)

However, if there are going to be items left over, you have several options

1. put those big-ass piles of your least-value items on the ground, far from the plot - if they're really that big, nobody's likely to carry them off either, and you don't want them near enough that the plot-placement item deletion bug might hit.
2. You have friends, don't you? Even if they don't have room to store stuff for you (or you don't want the drama of people arguing whose stuff was in that crate), they SHOULD be able to buy 5 packies for you, bring them to the old house, and friend you to them, and you pack THEIR packies up as well. The items should be stuff that the friend wouldn't be tempted to purloin (BOD books of crappy BODs, your guild's communal fish boxes that he already could have cleaned out had he wanted, etc.) or other low value stuff. It's not like they could argue that they accidentally put THEIR rare into pets that were bought expressly for your move....
3. If you're a pathetic loner, without friends you can trust to help, and don't feel like leaving stuff on the ground, you can always buy more packies with your other characters. Feed them to get them happy, load them up, tell them to stay (preferably some place where they can't walk off, such as some obscure NPC-less building somewhere), and log off. They won't log off with you because they are loaded, and will remain in the game, slowly losing loyalty (takes several hours for them to go wild). You can do this with 2 packies per character (plus the beetle being ridden), or 5 packies, without a beetle - and this includes any packies being used by the house placer. Make these the LAST LOADED pets, as well as the FIRST UNLOADED, immediately after placing the house and unloading any pack animals (other than the beetle) the house placing character has. This method has some minor risk (people letting pets out, or mongbats in to kill the pets), that can be mitigated by having someone you trust watching them.

Completing the move:

ALWAYS rebuild immediately.

Most of the time, people are upgrading to a keep or castle, and can start unpacking immediately. (holds true for any classic house design)

If the new house is a custom, throw up some temporary walls, floors and unpack on the roof (teleportal to the roof), locking down and securing containers. You can go back later and redesign the house at your leisure, and by putting everything on the roof, you won't misplace stuff behind walls or in accidental floor holes.

As noted before, start by retrieving and unpacking every pet that is not a mount, that is carrying stuff, be it pack horses of the placer, pack horses of other characters that were left floating when you logged off to place, or ones that others friended to you. You can take your time with the stuff in your banks, your backpacks and your beetles, though it's probably a good idea to unpack the beetles as soon as possible, in case something goes awry and the game decides you weren't riding the beetle when you logged off, after the fact.