I've had a few bad moves in my living-away-from-my-parents'-house history, but none so bad as our last one. I'll spare you the details of a pretty long story, but the gist is that we thought we wanted to move, we sold our house, we changed our minds, we still had to move, and we didn't really have anywhere to go. That was fun enough, but then after we secured our apartment (where we live now) my upper back muscles started hurting so much that I couldn't even turn my head, and my chiropractor forbade me to do any lifting. So, in the weeks prior to our move, I couldn't do any work and my husband was away during the day at his summer job, so you can probably imagine how organized a move that was. It involved tossing "stuff" into garbage bags at the end because we had run out of boxes, and those bags were immediately thrown onto the truck of a friend who was helping us. He was heard later saying, "Never ask me to help you guys move again." It was horrid, and I assure you, unpacking was no fun, either.
But that is in the past, and since we have time to do things better this time, I'm starting now. My first stop for advice for anything is the FlyLady, and on her site she has an entire section devoted to moving tips. I printed that article, and I gathered all of the Sharpie markers I could find to make a color-coded chart of the rooms we will be moving. I plan to color-code the boxes so that finding what-goes-where is not as difficult once we get there. I am also going to be brutal with decluttering, and if we don't love it and use it, it's not going with us. (Local freecyclers, stay tuned--your ship may be about to come in!)
So, check back to see what's working and what isn't, and if you have any tips for me, I would love to hear them!
5 comments:
Rachel, I totally feel your pain. When I moved from a smallish 3 bedroom/2 bath 1-story home to our non-smallish home now (6 bedroom/3 bath 2-story) I totally freaked. The smartest thing I did was to set up a staging area.
Everything that did not need to be immediately unpacked went into a room I called, for lack of a better term, "staging." Furniture, clothes, and kitchen was unpacked ASAP. Everything else in staging was piled in boxes by room and I unpacked from that location.
The rest of the house was fairly presentable (garbage bins and bags and boxes were all in the staging room!) and I made a goal of unpacking 2 boxes per evening when I got home from work.
Stuff I didn't know what to do with, I moved to an uptairs room and that became my second "staging" area once I was to the point of putting things into the original downstairs staging room.
Maybe that will help!
Great advice, Bryssy--I really like the staging area idea!
Sounds like you are off to a great start! Hope it all goes well. Very exciting!
I'm so excited for you guys!
When we moved to our current house, our little guy was the same age as yours. I was 8 months pregnant and couldn't carry everything further than the room it belonged in. We labeled all the boxes for the room they would go in and my job in the new house was to unpack quickly and put as much away as possible and get organized. Little Guy thought his job was to unpack the boxes as quickly as possible and play with the contents. This spurred me on to get it DONE!!! I don't remember too many lingering boxes after the move. As frustrating as it is, having a toddler around really forces you to unpack quickly and efficiently! (I used the FLYLady site for moving tips as well!)
Good luck!
Great tips! I can't wait to hear more as the story unfolds.
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