things i have learned in the move

June 15th, 2009

#1-Boxes are free
Start searching craigslist a month before for free boxes and you won’t have to pay for any. People are very generous.

Don’t write on the boxes so when you pass them on they are clean and pretty. Use different color paper to make notes on what is in the box, to help with actual move day by tell the movers what goes where. Also helps with unpacking. Then make sure you have enough of each color.
Me ”Blue is the small bedroom, purple is our room, green is the living room and yellow is the kitchen”

Mover: “Ok I have a white label where does it go”

Me: “uh…that is Living room too”

Did I bother counting the sheets I had before assigning the largest room? No. But you should!

#2-Moving while 8 mos pregnant sucks.
It is not easy for many reasons. When you cant lift or bend packing is hard, and unpacking is harder. On top of that Matthew does not remember anything he packed.

Location: Our new Living Room

Time: Mid-Afternoon, day after we moved in

Scene:  MP: “Have you seen where the black power strip from our room went”

Me: The one you packed 3 days ago? no.”

#3 -Moving is the perfect time to declutter.
We seriously downsized for this move. We turned our office/catch all into a room for the baby so we needed to get rid of a ton of stuff to make it all fit.
While packing, always have a box open to collect things to get rid of. We still have ours going so as things get unpacked if we don’t love it, it goes to good will. We’ve dropped off about 5 bags of clothes/sheets/towels and 20 boxes over the past few months. Just this weekend we donated 3 more boxes and now the one we have going is almost full, I’m sure by the weekend we’ll have 2 more. Its amazing how much you don’t need when you are trying to maximize your space. We slowly went from 4 full size billy bookcases 3 years ago to 3 halfsize ones today. When all our books didn’t fit in the new allocated space we ditched enough to make it work. I only kept ones I loved or haven’t read before because thankfully I finally realized that I don’t care if people walk in and say “wow, you have alot of books” It makes me feel so much better to say “I go to the library” Same with DVDs. We stopped buying them for the most part years ago, I think we probably only accumulated 2-3 a year the past 5 years but we still had about 150-200. We have netflix, and cable, and plenty of places to rent them if I’m having a psychotic DVD viewing related emergency. If it wasn’t a kids movie and I didn’t watch it in the past year I donated it. I would have liked to sell them but in the end the time just wasn’t worth the $50-$100 I would have made.

This week I have been dealing with the miscellaneous boxes of random stuff. Office supplies, crafts, old photos, mementos, stationary…probably the hardest ones yet.

#4 – If you have large junk people will buy it.
Even though its a huge pain in the behind, take the time to sell anything on craigslist before you move so you don’t have to deal with it later.

Now this may seem like a no-brainer and really we tried to get it together but ended up with 4 things at the new apartment we needed to get rid of. Matthew goes to the school of just putting everything out on the street but I can’t help it – if I can make $25 thats better than nothing.

It was a bit of a hassle to sell all those things at once while unpacking but I brought in a total of $230. Which was more than enough to cover the baby’s new dresser/changing table!

#5 – Things take way longer than you estimate.
Do not offer to paint. If your landlord asks what you want to do just say no even thought you don’t want a crap job done by crap workers with crap paint that you will want to touch up for 2 years. Tell them to just do it all white even if you want Natural Wicker.

Especially if you end up painting your humungous LR/DR area Cotton Ball. AHEM.

(We are doing the pipes and around the windows this week. Again, HOW DID THESE PEOPLE LIVE HERE??)

Tags: lessons

Entry Filed under: Around the house