Speaking of boxes, the ones bananas arrive at the grocery store in is excellent, especially for books.
Very sturdy, hard to crush, and will hold a decent amount. Just about perfect for books come to think of it.
We moved last summer; we were both fairly veteran movers, but we still learned stuff. We bought proper boxes (and received a gift of boxes from a fellow Doper that were immensely appreciated) and hired movers. We cheaped a little on the movers and only got two and a truck - next time we get at least three and a truck. Those two guys busted their asses for 10 hours on a very hot day.
We packed a couple of bags like we were going on vacation - those held our current stuff that we needed right away.
Yes, you MUST be fully packed and ready to go on moving day if you have anyone else helping you. It is extremely irritating to be volunteering your time and effort to help a friend/family and get there to find out that you take the move more seriously than they do.
My sisters all went through moves in the last couple of years, and we reached a point where we were basically all squared up moving wise. Jim and I hired movers for our last move instead of asking friends and family to get us out of the being asked to help move loop. We’re in our 40s now, and we’re done with that.
“Are you taking all nine boxes of parachutes?”
“I think that crown will fit in this box, if the gargoyle wears it.”
“We’re just going to have to lay these wings on top of the altar.”
Those are actual quotes from my last move.
My advice for moving is to mark boxes with priority as well as location. It could be as simple as “1” and “2”–“1” is “unpack immediately” and “2” is “unpack when you get around to it”. Try to keep the “1” boxes accessible when piling them up. Unpacking doesn’t have to all be done at once, and this will help you avoid digging through a lot of irrelevant stuff when you’re looking for something (besides the toilet paper) in a hurry.
The only story at the moment I have is the last time we moved - two years ago now - it turned out to be 97 degrees and 98% humidity. We moved in June, but June doesn’t usually get that hot here. We were the lucky ones. :rolleyes:
Good luck to you though!
Don’t use any boxes that used to store food, and to be on the safe side, avoid boxes from supermarkets, even if they used to hold shampoo bottles. Down that road lie roach eggs.
Set aside one bag with a set of linens and your pillow and blanket, such that you can easily make up your bed on moving day. Aside from the items on gotpasswords excellent list, know where your shower curtain (with its hanging thingies!) is, because after shlepping boxes, you’re going to want to take a shower.
I ate at a restaurant called Blueberry Hill during the “big” moving day from apartment into my house. It was a big, honkin’ 4 egg chili omelet. I felt pretty awful the rest of the day, but it was the only day everyone could help with the move, so I couldn’t postpone it. At the end of the day, the only thing left in the apartment was bathroom supplies and our bed. We slept in the apartment. At about 2am, the tummy was a’rumblin’ and I realized if I didn’t get to the bathroom RIGHT NOW I would regret it forever. I stumbled through the hallway in a half-daze, felt my vision narrow and the stood-up-too-fast tinglies circled around the back of my skull and collided in front of my eyes as I sank to my knees and collapsed on the bathroom tile. My bare chest was touching the cool tile, and the only thing going through my mind was “this isn’t so bad!” I had forgotten all about the urgent need to reach a toilet and puke my brains out. I pulled the towel off the rack and tucked it under my head, and slept chest-to-tile until my wife woke me up around 7am in a panic. I’m sure I did not look exactly alive in that position, and it took a few moments to make her realize that nothing was wrong.
I haven’t eaten a chili omelet since.
Not a moving story, exactly, but a post-moving one:
In August 1995, my then-wife and I moved from an apartment to the house we would rent for the next two-and-a-half years. We were just finishing getting settled in on the Monday that was my first day of grad school, to which I commuted 45 minutes each way. It was also my birthday, but that’s beside the point.
Come 11:00 or so, I was exhausted and completely ready for bed. As I sat down, I went to turn on my bedside light and realized that it hadn’t been plugged in yet because it needed an extension cord. Wanting to get this taken care of, I went and got an extension cord, got it into the outlet, then plugged in the light and tried to drop the cord behind the headboard.
The bed, part of a $3000 solid cherry wood bedroom suite that my grandmother had given us for a wedding gift, had been placed juuust too close to the wall to allow the plug end of the extension cord to fit, so I grabbed the top edge of the headboard and pulled it, trying to just wiggle out enough room to get the plug to drop.
Instead, the solid cherry wood headboard snapped at the point the side rail joined it, dropping the rail, the box spring, the mattress, and my fat ass to the floor. Whereupon the plug dropped very nicely behind it to the floor also.
Yay. All moved in.
Yeah, that sounds about right. 
Banana boxes? May contain giant spiders. 
:eek:
Sometimes two problems can solve each other.
The last time I moved, I had some fragile items that wouldn’t neatly fit into boxes. Stereo components come to mind. I was also concerned with how I was going to move my clean clothes. And how would I get them clean? I had no free time to do laundry. What I found is that dirty clothes make excellent packing material. Pad a box with a few dirty t-shirts, put a stereo component in it, and move it to the new location.
Many years ago I moved to a new place that was only 5 or 6 blocks from my old place. My new roommate helped me. Most everything was easy, but a few items were really heavy or awkward. The worst was my bed. We tried to figure how to move these things, and we came to two conclusions: One, heavy things can go on my bed, and two, my bed had wheels.
It’s probably too late for the OP, but I send a huge heaping of my clothing to the dry cleaners for laundry. (Just regular launder - not dry clean.) They’re out of the way, they don’t get moving crud on them, and they come back all clean without having to do eight loads of laundry. (Caveat: Out-of-town movers not applicable…)
When I was moving out of an apartment once, while I was expecting the moving crew, I heard a knock at the across-the-breezeway neighbor’s door. I thought, “sounds like the moving crew are knocking on the wrong door, so I went to my door, and looked out the peephole to make sure.
Nope. Not the moving crew. It was a black guy, and off to the sides—and out of peephole range—were two white guys. I thought to myself, “This looks interesting!”
Then, a voice from inside the apartment says “Who is it?” Black guy says, “It’s me, Tyrone. I need to talk to you.” (Now, why the inside guy didn’t look out the peephole to id him is a mystery.”
Anyway, “Inside guy” is a little wary about letting Tyrone in, but he does. And as he opens the door, Tyrone walks in.
And right behind him the two white guys, who then pull out their badges.
And then about another half dozen people of various shades, some uniformed, some not. They had apparently already surrounded the apartment, just in case he tried to make a getaway out the side patio door.
I thought, “Wow! This is some serious $h!t going down. Wonder what it is?”
The next day’s paper had a front page article about a fake id ring that had been busted. The guy across the breezeway was one of the ring. One person in it actually worked at DMV, and I think he was making the fake id’s as a side business—but I’m not so sure now.
That would make a great cold open for L&O. CI, maybe even SVU.
Of course, if it was CI, it would probably mean that you’d wind up being the perp.
I’ve moved something like 19 times in 22 years. My very last move was approximately 12 feet. Not kidding. I bought the house across the street from the one I was renting. Seriously, the driveways line up perfectly to each other. I still stare at the landscaping mistakes I made ten years ago in the rental house. (oops)
I bought a hand truck and acquired 5 or 6 big boxes. Every day, I would come home from work, load up whatever dirty dishes I had in the sink into one box, and then pack the other boxes with whatever else. I’d cart my 5-6 boxes across the street on my hand truck, unload the dirty dish box straight into the dishwasher (didn’t have one in the rental house), unpack the boxes and then take the empties back across the street. Next day, lather, rinse, repeat.
It took me six weeks to move everything across the street.
Hilarity ensued. All my neighbors offered to let me use their trucks, hardy har har. It was ridiculous, but hiring someone or actually renting a U-haul would have been ludicrous. Finally, on the last day, which was the day before my birthday, I asked some friends to come over to move the TV and whatever heavier furniture I was keeping (I trashed a lot of it). They got all that done in about an hour. I woke up on the morning of my 34th birthday in my new house, pleased as punch. (And yes, I’d planned it that way.)
That was the only time in my life that I A) enjoyed moving, and B) actually sang Happy Birthday to myself. Well, I sang it to the dogs, but it wasn’t their birthdays.
During that six weeks, I bought seconds of everything, a second toothbrush, a second needle nose pliers, a second phillips head screwdriver, a second tape gun, a second box cutter, etc. I got sick of running back and forth across the street for stuff, so I had “rental house stuff” and “my house stuff.” Now that it’s all in “my house,” it has become “upstairs stuff” and “downstairs stuff.”
I hope that my next move will be either completely done by someone else or it will be straight into a nursing home (and therefore, completely done by someone else). There is nothing I despise more than moving. But I did get it down to a science and moved several states away within three weeks (from decide to move to moved = 3 weeks) … twice.
Do you own a nice neon orange bag? That would be an excellent place to carry this stuff. Something that will stand out when it’s in that 6’ tall pile of boxes in your living room.
When ever we help someone move, I try to make sure that before everyone leaves the bed is set up and linens on it, and the bathroom is in good enough shape to take a shower in.
As for moving stories:
15 years ago we moved out of our 3rd floor condo and into a house. We had zero desire to schlep the sofa, beds and fish tanks down to the first floor, so while we packed everything, we hired a crew to carry it out and to drive it to the new house. Since the stairs had lots of turns, the crew used fabric belts, wrapped around shoulders or heads and then under the boxes, to make it possible to carry the boxes on their backs rather then in their arms. One of the guys would pull out a black magic market, scribble furiously on the belt where it would be right over his forehead. Yep, he was trying to huff magic marker while carrying my boxes down the stairs.
My one rule of moving is this: As soon as the beds get moved into the new place, set them up, and as soon as they’re set up, make them. That way, at the end of the day, when you’re exhausted, you’ll at least have a nice made-up bed to collapse into.
In order to do this, you’ll need to have a one box that has the sheets, pillows, mattress pads, whatever in it, and made sure it gets packed last or put in your car.
I hate moving. The last two times I’ve had to move I had to do everything by myself.
The second to last time I had to drive 3 hours to pick up my mom’s truck, load it with my stuff, drive 45 minutes to my grandma’s, load it with more of my stuff, drive down to SB, unload, drive back up to my mom’s to get her her truck back, back to my grandma’s for the last of my stuff, then back in SB.
The last time I just rented a Uhaul and moved about 40 miles away. Unfortunately my older brother was really sick that day, so I had to load the entire truck up (the only help I got was with a mattress from the apartment maintenance worker. Nice guy), dive 40 miles, unload everything, by myself, and then drive it back to turn it in.
I think I’m going to get movers for the next move in the summer.
We moved into our house the weekend before Memorial Day (this was many years ago). We were moving ourselves - not very far, only about a mile and a half away. I had gone to the U-Haul place several weeks before and reserved a big truck with a ramp so that we could get all the furniture loaded and moved with a minimum of fuss.
At the time, I didn’t consider that that would be the same weekend that all the college kids were moving out of their apartments. Moving day comes, I go to pick up the truck first thing in the morning, and the guy tells me that they don’t have any. It was like the scene from “Seinfeld” where Jerry is arguing with the rental car woman about his reservation. All they had available was one of the small trucks that didn’t have a ramp, and the guy told me I could only rent it for four hours because he had a waiting list.
Did I mention that we had a piano that we had to move?
Also, the builders were still working on our house the day we moved in. The house we bought was next door to a “Parade of Homes” house, so our builder had pretty much thrown all his resources at that one to make sure it was done on time, and then eventually got around to finishing ours up.
Just as a note of general interest, I thought I’d mention that Miss Melody got all moved in with no problems and even a couple of hours to spare before the skies opened up into a torrential thunderstorm.
Now she’s just waiting for TimeWarner to get her cable/internet clusterfrak straightened out.