How to be Awesome at Moving

We're moving. 

After seven years of living in an apartment in Hoover, we're finally buying a house!  This has been a long and difficult process for us for many reasons which I'm sure most people have heard be whine about.  BUT the point is, that's over, and we close on our house on July 8th.  I'm still cautious about being too excited, 'cause I'm sure something horrible will happen before then, but I have to go ahead and plan like it's actually going to work out.

So that means we're moving.

I.  Hate.  Moving.

I mean, I'm really excited about getting a house, and it's gonna be awesome, but moving is just horrible.  It's like, let's take your entire life and put it in a blender, pour the contents into several random containers, seal them, and then hide them.

Boo.

So I'm trying to make the moving process as painless as possible by Being Awesome at Moving.  That means several things.  First, it means getting a head start.  I have had a little over a month's warning, (we officially get possession of the house on the 13th, and we'll probably move in that weekend of the 16th) so I'm trying to plan ahead.  I've been cleaning and organizing and decluttering as much as possible so that I can figure out what actually NEEDS to be packed and what just needs to be thrown away (and probably should have several years ago).  I am amazed by all the just junk I keep finding.  I mean, where does all this stuff come from?  I am not a super high-maintenance person unless you count needing lotion instantly available at all times, and yet I seem to require massive amounts of random stuff in order to survive.  Amazing.

The second thing that Being Awesome at Moving means is getting organized.  If there's anything I can do, it's hyper-organize something.  You should have seen me when I moved to college for the first time.  I might have gone a little overboard.  (I had a list for each category of things that I needed, lists of which boxes everything was stored in, and then a list of all my lists, complete with decorative and appropriately-themed clip art on each page).

So I decided to get organized by color-coding everything.  I assigned every room of the house a color, and then label everything accordingly.  I have post-it notes to color code all the boxes, colored dots to label the furniture, and colored ribbon to tie on plastic bags, suitcases, or anything else that needs a label.

And of course, I have a master list.  It looks like this.

And so to help the (I am sure, hehe) plethora of friends and family that will be coming to help us move, I also made labels for each of the rooms so that whoever is bringing in boxes/furniture/whatever knows what color goes with what room.  They look like this:

AND I made Brian and I packing apron kits so that we'll have everything we need at our fingertips while we're packing!

I have also heard of people numbering every box and keeping an inventory of everything that goes in each box in a notebook.  Not sure I'm going to make it to THAT level of obsessive, but kudos to those people.  That's hardcore.

A third way to Be Awesome at Moving is to get lots of boxes. 

However, I have currently put a ban on my husband bringing any more boxes into the house because we have reached the point of diminishing returns.  More boxes are no longer helpful to us, but instead, become something else to trip over and constantly move to new spots on the floor while we try to get to the stuff we would like to put IN the boxes. 

Not to mention that actually packing boxes is like the worst game of Tetris ever.  At least in Tetris, all the pieces do conceivably fit together in some way.  Not in packing.  I always end up with big gaps and nothing that will fit in them, or boxes that are stuffed too full to close.  And then you have to wrestle with the packing tape.  I got one of those super-cool tape dispensers that is supposed to make it easier to tape up the boxes.  Doesn't work.  Yesterday, I managed to hit my head on the table, cut a finger on the jagged metal teeth of doom, and halfway tape my leg to the floor, just trying to get one box sealed.!

This is why I hate moving.

But yeah, so we have lots of boxes, and I'm sure we will get more, but not until we fill up all these.  Then the problem becomes, what do we do with all those boxes once we pack them?  It's not like we have a lot of room in our two bedroom apartment (aka the reason we are moving).  We had to break down the guest bed and turn the guest bedroom into a staging area of all our packed and maybe-sorta-packed stuff. 

Which means, if you plan on coming to stay with us in the next month, I hope you like the couch......and packing.