I checked the one month option, but I might start even sooner.
I moved into a 2-bedroom a long time ago. When my roommate moved out, I just expanded into his space. I ended up living there for a total of 15 years. The last 15 months of that time I was unemployed and grew a little lazy. Then I found out that I was losing the apartment, and my job prospects were growing ever dimmer. It was a pretty dark time in my life.
Then the gods smiled on my life. I got a job offer and an apartment offer on the same day. I was to start the job the following Monday. I had 3 weeks to train to the level where I could run the office by myself. Coincidentally, the end of that 3 weeks was going to be moving day for me. So I went from being a useless but worried slug to working full time during the day and packing at night. In those 3 weeks I had no time to spare.
Last time we moved, it was a from a 2 bedroom apartment to a larger apartment in a different province, and I think we started packing about a week before the move, with most of the work done in the day or two immediately before. I didn’t find it particularly stressful.
And then you have to seal all the boxes and og-forbid you miss one? No. Fill 'em, seal 'em, and if you have to get into it, cut the tape. Label the boxes with more than just the room it came from. And if they’re especially heavy - read: hardback books - mark them as HEAVY as a warning for your friends and your back.
A lot depends on what sort of place you live in, what stage of life you’re in, and so forth.
I moved a few times between college and my 24th birthday, and all those moves consisted of tossing my stuff in my VW bug and driving to the new place. (I rented a series of furnished apartments/rooms during that period. My stuff consisted of clothing, sheets, books, a small cassette deck, and a bicycle.) Prep time: minimal.
Between ages 24 and 40, I was living in apartments, and moving meant renting a truck, loading the furniture and boxing up all the miscellaneous crap with the help of friends, and unpacking at the new place. I’d usually start organizing for the move, if not packing per se, 2-3 weeks beforehand. A lot of the prep consisted of going through my stuff and tossing things I didn’t want to move.
Since then, my wife and I have lived in houses, and have had our moves paid for by our new employers. When they’re packing you, you just have to make sure to pack a few boxes for your personal stuff, and whatever you’ll need in your first several days in the new place, because other than that, your role is to know where everything should go in the new place, and directing traffic there. So while you should think about that a bit ahead of time, the actual doing of it just takes a few days.
We don’t plan on moving again until we need to move into assisted living, but hopefully that’s 30 years down the road. When that happens, most of our move prep will again consist of throwing stuff out. That’ll take some serious time.
Don’t pack boxes completely full of books. Paper is heavier than you’d think. Pack them as if they were a bookshelf, with one row of books. Boxes from the liquor store are good for this.
No, because you begin by sorting out the stuff you will need on the day of the move This is kept separately. The rest of it you pack a little at a time, closing but not sealing the boxes (except maybe for things you obviously won’t have to get into without warning, like the good china). On the day morning of the move, you just seal up the boxes. Takes only minutes. Or, if you’re Cheetara leaving that wanker Tygra for your one true love, Panthro, only seconds.
I have so few things… I can be out of the house with the important stuff in under 10 minutes. I can have all my stuff packed and in my truck in 4 hours.
But I have few physical possessions. Most of my luxuries are digital.
I imagine this will change if I ever bother getting a house, but for now its nice.
We’re hoping to move in a month, and be completely moved in before the end of October. We’re packing NOW, and I’m weeding out stuff (mostly books) as I go. I am mostly packing stuff that I know we won’t need until November, at least. For instance, it usually is warm enough here until November to wear mostly summer clothes, so I’m packing up my heavy cloak and a couple of my shawls, and the winter weight bedcovers.
I’ve also implemented a strict “no book buying” policy until AFTER we move, but it’s very, very hard.
Now we have lots of stuff, so a month before. The last time we moved we got a storage area and packed up the clutter to make the house ready to show - and sold it in one day.
Now I think I would get one of those PODS and put the stuff in there. I’ve got lots of stuff I can easily stash for a few months without missing.
If I knew then, what I know now, as the saying goes. I didn’t have a lot of time. I was coasting along, enjoying my jobs, wishing I could move to the states, but never really believing that it was going to happen in under 3 years at the least.
All of a sudden, at the end of August, this other company starting making “hey, would you be interested in us” noises, and next thing I know, I’m hired and moving to Seattle, which was my first choice!
I found out for sure around the 2 week of September (though I’d already started making arrangements) and have been frantically trying to consolidate over 40 years of living in AK. I thought I’d gotten rid of so much during my brief stint in TX around 7 years ago, but apparently I’m a fast re-collector, because I’ve got WAY too much stuff.
What’s funny is how quickly “oh hell no, this goes with me” is turning into “nevermind, Salvation Army here you come” as the countdown gets smaller and smaller.
I’d start a month before, but there’d be lots of stuff that I wouldn’t be able to pack till a week before at the earliest. Last time I didn’t get any sleep at all for the couple of nights before I moved and was still packing on the day - it was the first time I’d ever moved an entire flat with furniture and I underestimated how long it’d take.
Right now I haven’t even got a place to move to, and I’ve already decluttered significantly and will probably do more. I won’t be taking my oven, beds or fridge-freezer, so that’ll help a bit.
I had friends who, back when we were in our early 20s, would do no preparation whatsoever. On moving day they would go buy a box of those Hefty extra-heavy-duty garbage bags, and we’d all stuff shit in them randomly, get it all over to the new place, dump it all out and sort through it. Ah, those were the days…
Early 30s, did in my immediate post-college days, move back from college (in another state) to an apartment and then two years later into another apartment across town – had some help for both with the furniture, heavy items with some individuals who worked for my father’s construction compnany and I moved smaller things on my own over a couple of weeks. Went well, although in retrospect, the cross town move of the smaller objects was disorganized.
When I moved cross country the first time, I did my packing, had great experience with moving company. It was not paid for by my job (medical residency) but I got a 50% discount. Fast forward four years and I’m coordinating two moves (both cross country, in different directions with some things going into storage… furniture that wouldn’t fit into the area I was living for a year but too nice – heirlooms – to get rid of). I packed again myself but had bad experience (I thought the worst at the time) with the moving compnay. I was selling my house so I started packing about three months prior to the move to declutter and get the place ready to sell – that part worked well, sold in 3 weeks (earlyl-mid 2008).
I’m potentially (very likely) moving again soon but start date is up the air so soon is vague. I’d again be putting a house on the market and so right now I’m just trying to be aggressive about decluttering/letting things go. Hopefully that will make packing at the time when I start easier. I realized finally that my having moved old prom dresses through all these past moves was not that smart as I would never wear them again and honestly, on most of them I didn’t have emotional attachment to them.
We did the same, renting a storage facility enabled us to “stage” the house in a manner that presented it best. For example, it was short on closet space so we moved a great deal of clutter out of the closets, thus making them appear more adequate. Also, the mountain of toys did little to enhance the look of the kid’s bedroom, so off they went.
WRT the pods, we considered that but knew we’d need frequent access so we stuck with the standard facility. If you’re fortunate enough to be moving nearby you migh find a place convenient to your new home.
No kidding. Our last move was company paid, so I mostly was there to direct traffic and answer questions. We were totally surprised at how much of the moving truck our stuff took up. After we unpacked all the boxes and the pile of used papers (straightened out and stacked up) topped out at almost 5ft, we understood what was taking up that much space. Scrunched up paper.
