Boxes from liquor stores are perfect. They’re big enough to fit most anything you own, but small enough to not fit EVERYTHING you own. It’s nearly impossible to pack a liquor store box too heavily.
Books: No more than 10 books in a box. Period.
If it’s a big box, NOTHING heavy goes in it, unless it’s the only box it’ll fit in.
When you get back from your donation run to Goodwill, go through your closet again and make another donation pile. You really don’t need that flannel shirt you haven’t worn in 2 years.
Don’t fill a box with books. Put them in as if it were a bookshelf. When one row of books is complete, that’s it. I know more books will fit in there, but it will be too heavy to lift if you do.
Jewelry, important papers, and medications (especially prescription medications that you take frequently) should travel with you, not with your stuff.
Liquor and wine stores are a good resource. They often have boxes that are a good size and that they will let you have for free. Grocery stores might do the same, especially if grocery stores can sell wine and liquor in your state.
If you have a house full of books, like I do, or a lot of clothes, don’t try to pack them all in one day. It takes longer than you think. Set a daily quota of boxes to pack, instead.
Locate a thrift store or used bookstore that will take anything you want to give them.
The best moving advice that has ever been given was right here on this board some time ago. Akin to “Ask yourself where the toilet paper is. If the answer is not ‘Right here in my hand!’ then stop what you’re doing, go and get some, and you aren’t ready until you have it beside you as you move.”
Anyway, start packing as far in advance as you can, and keep doing regular weedings throughout the packing process to give stuff away to Goodwill or friends or whatever.
It can’t be said enough that irreplaceable items must absolutely travel with you. My mom’s original baptismal certificate was lost in a move. Important jewelry, important papers (do not lose your passport in a move!), family treasures must all travel with you. Seriously. The chest my great-grandfather built in the Old Country and passed on, eventually coming to my parents? You better believe that was traveling in the car with us.
Seconding the recommendation to have a shower curtain (if necessary) in your box of essentials. You WILL want to have a shower, and it will be very unpleasant if you have to soak the entire bathroom while you do. Make sure you’ve got a towel as well.
In my accident-prone circle, we always always always leave out the First-Aid kit on the counters until the moving process is entirely over. You only need to cut your hand open and bleed all over the house hunting down what box you packed the Band-Aids once before you learn to keep the bandages (and the rubbing alcohol and the neosporin) within arm’s reach. Also, BRING PAINKILLERS. Because not only is moving a headache in itself, but it’s incredibly easy to injure yourself somehow and it’s better to be prepared.
If you are close enough to do some of it yourself: Buy ten large trash cans with wheels on them and dump in anything that can’t break (I move all my books this way.) Then just wheel them to and from your car. Of course, you end up making several trips, if you have lots and lots of books like I do.
Clearly mark which room each box is going into, and if you have a garage or storage space, put lots of the boxes there to start with.
Your winter cloths, the Christmas dishes and lots of your book don’t need to be unpacked right way. Having those boxes sitting in your living room is only going to make unpacking that much harder. We’ve gotten to the point where maybe 1/3 of the boxes don’t come into the house right way, and are marked “garage” when we move. They are out of the way during unpacking, and I know that the boxes that I am opening first are the ones I actually want to get to.
Get those mover blankets or older sheets/blankets to put on the corners of all your furniture when they go in the trailer. When crap moves around, it’ll damage your furniture.
Try to get started packing WAY ahead of time and pack some stuff every night.
You’ll be tempted to leave ‘the easy stuff’ for the day of the move. Don’t do this. It’ll be more than you think and you’ll waste time/get stressed trying to pack it all up as the movers wait for you.
I don’t know if we are talking a cross town or cross country move. If the former, try to move the really fragile and awkward things first yourself. Consider that the new place may not have enough lights so move at least a portion of the lamps in advance, or you’ll find unpacking into a dark apartment at night a real bummer.
While towels and ratty t-shirts are fine for packing materials in leiu of paper and packing peanuts to save money, don’t go too apeshit with that idea. You’ll be surprised just how dirty things like the bottom of your electronics are, and I can assure you once you start packing everything, you are not going to be interested in how clean the bottom of the computer is, and that layer of dust between the receiver and the DVD player doesn’t seem like a big deal. Then you put a few nicer shirts in there as packing material, and you unpack everything on the other end, wondering where all these horrendous stains came from. I’m not sure the savings in packing materials makes up for the tons of laundry you now have to do (and possibly iron) versus the $10.00 you saved not getting a wardrobe box.
I do agree that you should prepare in advance for the feeling of exhaustion at the end of the unpacking day and make a bed in one of the bedrooms as a first step. Start checking Craigslist and Freecycler now for someone else in your neighborhood who just moved and they’ll be getting rid of their boxes, so you can get them for free that way…
I like that suggestion of the First aid kit too. Indeed, someone always gets cut on something in a move, and there is a mad dash to a CVS to buy bandaids because they are packed away somewhere. Brilliant!
If you’re using movers, your name should go on every box.
If you’re using movers, have them pack the fragile stuff like dishes. They know what they’re doing (hopefully), and, if they break something, you have more recourse if they packed it than if you did.
The earlier you start packing, the slower you can take it. You can start with the seasonal stuff that’s out of season- the holiday decorations, the winter clothes if it’s summer or vice versa, and so on.
Your driver’s license(s) and wallet should be with the important papers, even if you won’t be driving. So should birth certificates and Social Security cards. Losing your driver’s license is not something you want to deal with, if you can avoid it. It’s not fun, and it can come back to bite you in the ass years later (the thief that stole more than $2000 out of our checking account last month did so with an old copy of Mr. Neville’s California driver’s license. We moved out of CA in 2007.). You’ll need your wallet to pay the movers, and they will not be happy if you make them wait while you look for it. Keep a checkbook with you, too, in case they don’t take credit cards.
Keys and garage door openers don’t go in boxes. They either stay behind or travel with you.
If you’re putting small stuff in boxes, make sure they’re not boxes with handle holes.
Back up the important stuff on your computer before the move. Keep it either online, or on a CD or DVD ROM you carry with you. Better safe than sorry.
Make sure you tell your credit card companies and your bank that you’re moving. You don’t want somebody you don’t know to be able to get hold of your bank or credit card statements.
At least a partial roll of toilet paper should be packed with this stuff. There are few things worse than really having to go, and having to hold it in because you can’t find the toilet paper. (OK, there are lots of worse things than that, but not many that you’re likely to have to deal with)
Have a phone with the essentials. This is especially true if you don’t have a cell phone, or you’re moving somewhere where you might not get good cell phone reception.
Moving is hard physical work. Drink lots of water while you’re packing and moving. Bottled water is good for this, because you’ll probably want to pack your glasses. It’s also nice to be able to offer the movers a bottle of water.
If somebody’s allergic to house dust, they may not be able to be much help. If you’ve just found out you’re massively allergic to house dust during a move, caffeine can help (really). Get out of the house and get a cup of black coffee (milk can make you stuffier).
A few days before you move, “close” the kitchen. Just declare that no more food will be prepared in it. Not only will this make it far easier to pack up the kitchen, going out for meals will be a nice break from the last minute moving fracas.
Leave your living room (or whatever area you like to relax in) for last, and leave all the boxes and moving detritus out of it. In your new place, get it set up first, and leave it similarly free of boxes and such. This creates a “move-free” zone that might help you retain/restore your sanity.
Unless you happen to know a good source, just buy some damn boxes. Stores can be surprisingly stingy with them, and many times the most stressful part of the move has been rounding up enough boxes. That said, you can often find the lidded plastic totes for not much more than you’d pay for an equivalent cardboard box from the moving company, and it will be far more useful for storage later.
I was going to say, “Hire a mover!”, but I see you already do that.
I color-coded my stuff, in the sense that I taped a label made from bright flourescent paper to the top of each box. I asked my movers if they could try to keep the colors together when they were hustling all my shit into my new place. Made it a lot easier for them to quickly know where to pile stuff.
Oh, and those re-useable bags from your grocery store are cheap, can be packed pretty full of heavy stuff, and have handles! I moved all my kitchen stuff/food I didn’t want to toss with them. Sure, the cashier thought I was nuts for buying 10 at once, but it was the best ten bucks I spent on the move.
Label every box. People helping the move should not have to waste time asking, “Where does this go?” It also helps with the transitional period when some things are still in boxes in the new place.
Leave some cryptic object in an out-of-the-way place when you leave. The people who move in will find entertainment in asking themselves what the Devil’s that doing there. When I moved in here, there was a riding crop in the front closet. When we remodeled the bathroom, there was a cavity for a long-ago medicine chest. Before papering over it, I put Batman and Robin figurines in it.
Another vote for marking boxes by room. Assign each room a number, and mark each box on all sides with the number of the room it goes in. Put index cards marked with the appropriate numbers at eye level next to the door of each room in the new place. Even if your movers/helpers can’t be arsed to look at the boxes or the signs before asking where you want something, you know at a glance where it goes.
A small cooler of drinks is awfully nice, too. Water, soda, beer, Gatorade, whatever. You’ll all want something cold and wet at regular intervals, especially this time of year.
Clarify well in advance what the movers will and won’t take–we got some unpleasant surprises last time when they refused to move our empty grill tank, any sort of potted plant, and one other thing that I can’t remember off hand. Some glass shelves I had strapped together with tape, maybe. Anyway, they didn’t bother to mention this until the very end, a couple hours after Doctor J had left and I was alone with two dogs, a carsickness-prone cat, most of the cleaning supplies, a small Saturn coupe, and a five-hour drive. I was not what you’d call best pleased.
Decide ahead of time what room each piece of furniture is going to, so you can direct the movers accordingly.
If at all possible, measure the rooms of your new place beforehand, sketching them out on graph paper with locations of doors and windows marked. Then make paper cutouts, to the same scale, of any furniture that’s large enough to matter, and move the furniture around on your graph-paper maps of your new place until you’re pretty satisfied that you know what’s going where, at least for now.
If you move periodically, you can keep the same furniture cutouts and use them in subsequent moves. I moved 10 times between the fall of 1982 and the fall of 1998, and while none of my furniture made it through all 10 moves, one bed lasted through 7 of them. I still have the cutouts tucked away in a file folder, even though I expect my next move will be to a retirement community in about 30 years.
