Moving tips please

Our family moved 13 times in 7 years with only 1 being in the same city.  My biggest suggestion would be to purge.  All of those moves forced me to simplify greatly – If I don’t LOVE it, or haven’t used it in 6 months I gave it away.  I still do that.  If I were you I would move systematically through each room in the house.  First I would purge the room and then I would go ahead and pack up items that you want to keep but don’t need.  You can do this one round through and by the time you finish that you may know a more precise date and can once again do another round of packing.  Label your boxes well!!! Top and sides.  It makes unloading and unpacking much easier.  On boxes that you won’t need immediately when you move just label the room they need to go in but the things you will need right away label the room but tape a list of items on the side of the box.  That way you don’t have to open every box to find those quick need items.

You can take this with a grain of salt but I must share it.  Kids use their imagination MUCH more when they only have a few toys.  And I mean a few.  For the last 4 years my kids toys have been very minimal and they play much better than when they had a lot more.  So take that into consideration during your purge.  Hope this helps.  LEt me know if you have specific questions.

Oh and liquor store boxes are the BEST!!!  They aren’t very big so they don’t get heavy but they are thick cardboard since most of them transport glass.  

Amy

I have moved three times in the last five years, all while homeschooling. I agree with the great practical advice the other ladies gave. For homeschooling specifically, I had a system I used each time as each move was during the school year. Each child had their own clear plastic box with a lid. These boxes fit together for easy stacking. All essential items such as books, math worksheets, copywork paper, clipboard aka portable desk, and a pencil box were in it. Our last move was to another state and these boxes were a lifesaver. They sat in the corner of the living room. We homeschooled up to the week of the move. We took off the week to pack it all up and drive, a week to put the house together some, and started school the following week. Even though all the boxes, even school boxes, were not unpacked we had easily identified the clear boxes and sat them in the corner of the dining room. We had everything we needed to start again.

I second purging, but calculate the cost of replacing items first. I wish I had brought some things I thought we were saving space by leaving!

We just did our 21st move in 13 years and looking forward to another this fall. Luckily, only the last three were while homeschooling. But 13 of them were with at least one kiddo. Man, that sounds like so much work when I type it all out.

Okay, my main tip is not to just shove anything in a box and then think you will get back to it and sort it all out when you get to the next place. You probably won’t. I didn’t. I have boxes and boxes and boxes of clutter and junk just taking up space we could be using more efficiently. The type of thing I mean is a box of papers from the desk drawer we use to stash stuff in (9 years ago) so we could call the desk top “clean” when someone was on the way over. Here are some of the items that would be found in any given box: receipts from stuff we don’t even have anymore, flyers we received in the mail from local business that no longer exist, our girls’ footprints on a little card from the hospital when they were born, a bunch of funny jokes printed off a typewriter that my dad (who died 14 years ago) thought were so great he made copies for us and all his nieces and nephews and mailed them out when I was still in college, the brochure from the B&B we stayed at on our honeymoon, and tons of pictures of our life’s adventures.

Yeah! Not worth being messy on the packing end because the unpacking is so hard to get to. Obviously I can’t just toss out boxes completely, because I’d lose some important stuff (pictures), but the stress of having all this junk closing in on me is reaching a fever pitch.

For our last move, we were in a large home, then homeless for several months, and now in a tiny rental apartment. Does that count as two moves? Anyway we put things in storage, then moved them to the rental, and I was very organized with labeling every box. I put all our science books together, science resources and supplies in another box, then math in one box and so on. I’ll change that for this next move, though. As I ended up with lots of books for each subject and then couldn’t easily find the one I needed. This time, I will pack all the books needed for one kid in a box and for the other kid in another box (or however many it takes) then put all my miscellaneous books separately from these core ones. I think I will even go so far as to put in the paper and notebooks and rulers and pencils that they will need with at least the first 6 months of school wherever/whenever we land.

So, that’s my two cents – pack well on this end so that it’s easier on the other side, label every box, put like things together. And the biggie, you’re already doing – purge! 🙂 We wish you well in this transition.