Need moving advice!

While you're packing items for storage, ask yourself if these items are necessary to keep & to pay the money you are spending to pay the storage. The less you keep, the smaller the storage locker you need.

Give each room in the new house a color for the boxes. Buy a set of markers to label the boxes on all four sides. Sometimes U-Haul has a space for used boxes. See of you can get them there. I would honestly start going through the attic or crawl space now. Purge away. Start saving newspapers or asking other people who have moved for any extra packing materials. Box as much as you can. The huge clothes hanging boxes are good for moving pictures. Start putting together an area in the house for moving materials.

I will be doing a similar thing. I am planning on moving to Southern Oregon and will most likely rent a house before deciding which area to buy in. I don't know how long it will be until I find a place and can move into it, so my things will need to be split into short term need and long term need.

I have already started packing boxes and have a system to do so.

My system starts with numbering my boxes in big black felt tip pen. All boxes from a specific room will start with the same number. Kitchen will be number 1, with the first kitchen box being 101. The family room will be 2xx, and so on.

Here is the important part. I also pack everything using a small card table because it hurt my back too much to keep bending down. I set up the card table in the room I am working in and I put the empty numbered box and everything planned to go in it on the card table and snapped a quick picture with my phone. I don't overpack the boxes because I can't carry a heavy box, so sometimes I could have squeezed in more things, but I don't. Only the items on the card table go into that box.

I have tons of packing paper that I bought off a guy on Craigslist. He was selling huge rolls of plain packing paper for $5. I have plenty to make sure everything is well packed. I am wrapping breakables really well.

Every evening after all the packing of the day, I downloaded all the photos from that day to my laptop and then changed the name of each photo to correspond to the number of the box in the photo. I will be making a main folder called Moving Boxes, and then separating my photos into a folder for each room.

The items that get used everyday and will get an E on the box, then the room number. So for last minute kitchen things used daily, it will be E1xx. There will be E boxes for the bathroom, kitchen, and master bedroom. This will be things I can't live without. They will be the last ones to be packed and first ones to be opened. I will most likely be living in a temporary house until I find one I want to buy. All of the E boxes will be moved into the temporary house and the remaining boxes will be sent to a storage facility. I will do the same thing taking a picture of the E boxes and renaming the photos on my laptop. And depending on what I end up renting, some of the longer term boxes may end up coming with me too, and I can easily separate those out by their checking the contents in my pictures and listing the numbers that I want.

Big items like furniture will get a piece of blue tape on them with their room number too. Then when I finally move into the house I buy, I will tape a number above the door to each room and the movers can unload the boxes into the appropriate rooms for me.

As I said, this is a more involved process, but really doesn't involve a lot more time. It just takes a few seconds to snap a quick photo and a couple of minutes to rename those photos each day at the end of a packing day.

And if I really need something that is in one of the packed boxes, I can pull up all the pictures for the room that item was in and quickly find it in the photos. Then I can go to the storage facility and grab just that one box.

Another reason for doing it this way is if I should be missing a box, I will know exactly what was in it. I have heard too many people talk about things getting "lost" in their move. Most of those people had put a list of what was inside the box on the outside of that box. A person wanting to steal something just had to read their labeled boxes and know which one has the "good silverware" or "jewelry" or whatever it is they decide to steal. With mine, all they get is a number on the box.

Oh yeah, I forgot to put that I also have a few big boxes in the garage where I keep putting yard sale/donation things. I am finding a lot of stuff that won't make the cut to move with me. Some will be sold, some donated, some offered to friends. I haven't moved in over 30 years, and have accumulated a lot of things that I don't want going forward. I also still have a huge amount of my son's items. I told him to pick them up or they will be sold. I'm not taking anything like that with me.

Is your house going to be larger or smaller than your current home?

Keep scale in mind when you think about what furniture you plan to keep/store, etc. We moved from a very large home with high ceilings to a much smaller home with only 8' ceilings. We made the mistake of moving all of our furniture. Not only was there way too much for our new home (what were we thinking?) but we ended up replacing even the pieces that made the "final" cut because their scale was just too large.

We moved again after about 9 years, this time across country - and we kept very, very little furniture this time around.

I can't give box packing advice because I always start out with fully inventoried and labeled boxes and end with boxes that are labeled "crap on the floor" and "stuff I don't want to deal with."

Mark boxes clearly 

Make a list of all boxes and what's in them.

Pack the things you need least first and, if you can, put them in storage with your moving company to hold. 

In the past two years, we moved to Canada and back. First thing, purge and declutter. I suggest starting with the low hanging fruit so that you will have a sense of accomplishment. Shred, shred, sherd old paperwork. Donate magazines and books. Give old blankets and towels to an animal shelter. The more you give away the better you will feel.

Buy boxes in a variety of sizes from a moving store. We had 12"x12"x12" boxes for books to keep the weight down. Label the contents of the boxes so that when you are unpacking 250 boxes you will have an idea of what is in the box. Buy a lot of newsprint (unprinted newspaper paper). Use it to wrap everything. Even in humid Vancouver it protected against condensation. I wrapped fragile books, vases, kitchen everything, frames, TV, electronics in paper before the bubble wrap.

Dynamite and matches! Seriously, this is a great time to clear your clutter and really get organized. Take pictures of stuff that you aren't sure if you should toss and toss the items, keeping the photos as a memory.

My family is preparing for a cross country move. We used the Marie Kondo method to get rid of everything that we don't really need or truly want. We have a pod coming on Friday. I made $2000 at our yard sale. We are soooooooo happy to be rid of stuff. Do it and don't look back.

I prefer Marie's second book: Spark Joy: An Illustrated Master Class on the Art of Organizing and Tidying Up

I went through each room in the house and pulled everything that we didn't want to keep. Everything left is okay to pack and haul with us. There is not a lot left, which is so freakin' awesome.

Make sure you make a small craft box so that you will have somethings fun to do. 

When we moved we bought totes so that when stacked in storage they take up less space and stack easier and taller stacks. 

Lowes has great moving boxes. They have handles! Highly recommend.