How to be Awesome at Packing

My home is in shambles right now.  It seriously takes me almost a full minute to find a flat surface to set a drink down on.  Brian woke me up this morning because he stepped on bubble wrap in the hallway.  I went to Starbucks yesterday for breakfast because there wasn't room in my kitchen to make a bowl of cereal.

Shambles.

Now, granted, I am not complaining about the fact that we're moving, because we've been trying to move for the past year and a half.  But moving and packing itself is just awful.  I don't care where you're moving to, or how much money you have, moving is awful.  (Unless you pay someone to pack for you move for you, and then unpack when you get there, in which case, you are either in the military or very rich.  If the former, thank you for your service.  If the latter, I hate you.)

We still don't have a definite closing date, although it could hypothetically be today, so I am packing up with the idea in the back of my mind that I might be living here with all these boxes for weeks or months or years.

Nevertheless, I am determined to be awesome at packing.  This weekend, in spite of it being our anniversary, we did a lot of packing.  My in-laws came over and helped us pack, which was awesome.  As a matter of fact, I think that's Step 1 for How to Be Awesome at Packing.

1)  Get help

Because Brian is working, I've been doing a lot of the packing myself, and that's cool, but after a while, it just becomes way too overwhelming and I start to have visions of napalm.  Get help.  With five of us working on Saturday, we got TONS packed in just an afternoon.  It was great.  Mom is flying into town today to help us, too.  Awesome.

2)  Stock up on Supplies

The most important supplies you need for packing are boxes, packing tape, Sharpies, packing paper, nail aprons, and whatever you use for your color coding system.  The packing paper is great because it's basically newspaper, but without ink on it, so when you pack stuff, you don't get black hands and clothes, etc., and when you unpack, your dishes are clean!  Well worth a couple of extra bucks.

Oh, and you need like, ten rolls of packing tape.  I know four seems like a lot, but it's not.  It's not at all.  I did get the fancy dispenser thingy with the handle, but honestly, I like the simple dispenser better, and that one fits on the carabiner on my packing apron.

We've also been lucky that we haven't had to pay for any boxes so far.  Brian has brought home lots of boxes from his work, and last weekend, he got a ton more from the back of the Dollar General.  Also, I've heard package stores are great for boxes, but then you run the risk of everyone thinking you're a drunk.

3)  Staging is important

One of the most complicated aspects of packing has been, where do we put the stuff once it's packed?  We don't have a ton of room, (hence why we're moving) so where do we put all these boxes?  For a while, we just kept them in the guest room, but eventually it passed the breaking point in there, and we had to start storing them in the living room.  Now they're just everywhere. 

Just, everywhere.

4)  Be sneaky

There are lots of sneaky little tricks I've learned from reading stuff online about packing.  Stuff like, don't waste a box packing all your sheets and blankets.  Leave them out and use them for packing fragile stuff or padding furniture.  Even t-shirts work well for packing dishes that you know you're going to unpack pretty quickly.  Pack your clothes in your luggage, 'cause it would be dumb to put your luggage in boxes.  Buy a big package of paper bowls, cups, and plates so you can go ahead and pack all your real stuff.

5)  Put your house on a diet

I have seriously thrown away probably a hundred pounds or more since I started packing.  I find so much stuff that I can't believe I have kept all these years!  Some of it is cool or brings back good memories, but it's not something I'm going to look through or want to keep on a shelf, so I take a picture of it and then toss it.  Later, I'll make a photo book out of all my pictures of treasures, and that will be fun, and take up way less space. 

I've found lots of loose pictures as I've packed up, and I've been trying to put them in albums so they take up less room, they're protected, and we can enjoy them.  Basic photo albums are cheap.  I'm not putting them in any specific order or labeling them or anything like that.  That needs to happen, but not right now.  Right now anything is better than keeping them in a stack in a box in the closet in the guest room.

6)  Keep your sanity

Seriously, I am not nearly as stressed as I thought I would be about this.  I used to get so stressed about moving, even just moving home from college for the summer.  But I'm making a conscious effort to keep my sanity by setting aside time every day to do things I love, like reading, dancing, crafting, and spending time with friends and family.  I know it means packing takes longer, but I don't care.  Call me selfish, but it is important to me that no one dies in this process.

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.