a moving system

01 February 2010

 I thought I would share a moving plan that is kind of spiffy. Instead of writing what is inside the box all over the outside of the box, get yourself a notebook and designate it your moving notebook. Guard it with your life! This will be the place you put all of your moving info~receipts, phone numbers, house hunting info, to-do lists, etc. When you get in the car, you ask (in this order): where is the moving notebook?? Dramamine? dvd remote? camera? baby bottle? oh yeah, and my purse?”On the outside of the boxes, get these cool stickers that have the rooms on them or write LR (Living Room) and then number them.dec 2009 jan2010 004



In your notebook, make a page for each room and then write the contents of the box in the notebook.dec 2009 jan2010 008 Then, when you have utter chaos in your house when everything is brought in, there will be a brief wave of calmness because you will know that the cereal bowls are in Kitchen #5 and the tp is in Bathroom #2 and those are the boxes to open first.dec 2009 jan2010 157 dec 2009 jan2010 156 A few more tips:
* This system works great… except for when you leave your master bedroom for the last and don’t get around to it until the morning the truck is being loaded (we moved ourselves and used ABF) and you and your friends are wildly and randomly throwing things into boxes and slapping a master bedroom sticker on it. You will so wish you used your organized, prepared system when you need the nebulizer and humidifier when your baby gets bronchilitis and you have no clue which master bedroom box it is in…just sayin’.
* Check Craigslist and Freecycle for free moving boxes. If you need to buy some, we found the cheapest prices on boxes by far were at the big box home improvement stores (the orange one and the blue one) Medium boxes were .99 and the big ones were 1.60!
* Make a special box for the car with all of your medications and important documents you’ll need for registering for school and work: birth certificates, social security cards, immunization records, computer passwords, etc.
dec 2009 jan2010 006

Happy Monday~

52 comments

  1. Here is faith in action. My house is going on the market on..cough..Wednesday..cough. I will NEED those stickers - say it and claim it, right?????

    ReplyDelete
  2. Great ideas, I am saving them for when my move comes up this year. I need all the help I can get to be organized for it, since this is the first move I have made without the help of the military.
    Really wonderful ideas, I would have never thought of most of them.

    Hugs,
    Cindy

    ReplyDelete
  3. That is the best moving idea that I've ever heard! When we get around to moving in the next few years, I'm following your lead.

    ReplyDelete
  4. Oh Melissa! You are a girl after my own heart. As an adult I have moved a lot and I finally got wise (two moves ago) and created a "Master Moving Notebook". I color coordinated all of my labels and numbered them, but I took it a step further and tabbed my master moving notebook with a label that matched the color labels. We also hung colored paper on each door that matched the label on the box so people could easily set stuff in rooms. It makes moving so much easier! You can prioritize what you unpack. How did the meeting go with the contractor's about your basement?

    ReplyDelete
  5. Thank you soo much for your tips! We too are putting th house on the market int eh next couple of weeks and are making a DRASTIC move/downsize for 1 year while my husband finished his last step in a VERY LONG education process. I have been bookmarking and studying your tips and suggestions on preparing the house for the market and now the great packing tips. THANKS GOODNESS for great friends in the same boat that are always up for painting and packing parties!

    ReplyDelete
  6. Don't need the giveaway, but I always found it helpful to pack the bedding in the dresser drawers of the room it goes in. Doesn't add a lot of weight, but it's right there where you need it.

    suzanne

    ReplyDelete
  7. we r showing our house today...maybe it will SELL...would love the stickers!

    ReplyDelete
  8. Great moving tips! We are in the military and they handle all of our moves. Thank goodness!! They number each box with a sticker that has a number on it. Then we have a master inventory list that has the box number and beside it what the contents of the box are. Three moves later I still find those darn little stickers every once and a while on something in our house. I wish they used the "bedroom, living room, etc" stickers though. Great idea.

    I always have a moving folder that contains our current military orders, birth certificates, vet records{for boarding our dogs if need be}, and all of our medical records.

    I also keep a little tote with us that has phone chargers, our laptop cords, baby monitors and chargers, etc. I have also been known to bring along all of the the nuts and bolts that hold my son's crib together. I have heard stories of where people couldn't put their child's crib together when their furniture arrived because the screws and such had been lost or misplaced.

    ReplyDelete
  9. Holy Moley! Where were you when I moved 2 years ago? I still have a few boxes tucked away in the garage and I have no idea what's in them (yes, organizing the garage is on my to do list). Thanks for the great idea! And thanks for linking up to my party.

    ReplyDelete
  10. You are my angel Melissa! We too are going to be moving soon. I would love to win those stickers (and if I don't where can I buy them?)! I have 2 moving tips:
    1. Start packing as soon as possible!
    2. When you arrive at your destination and start unpacking - make the beds your #1 priority. Then when you are exhausted from a long day of unpacking your bed is all ready for you!

    ReplyDelete
  11. Awesome system, that I pray I never have to use!!! I may faint at the hint of moving. You are a clever girl!

    ReplyDelete
  12. I use extra linens and towels in as extra padding for dishes. :-)

    ReplyDelete
  13. Be extra careful and don't back the Uhaul into the garage and crack the facia on the day you are moving out. Trust me...it makes the day more stressful! I'm just sayin'...:-)

    ReplyDelete
  14. I don't have any moving tips, but I have been loving yours. My family will be moving across country real soon. I NEED those stickers! I also would love any more tips you have to give! Thank YOU!

    ReplyDelete
  15. Upon arrival, put the beds together first. At the end of the long, long moving day, you will be so happy to have your bed to fall into!

    ReplyDelete
  16. I don't need to be entered into the drawing but would like to leave my packing idea with you. :)
    Get as many boxes as you can all the same size! We got ours at the big orange home improvement store all in the same size so that when we went to load up the moving truck they all stacked up nice and neat against the back wall. The boxes take up much less room this way since you don't have that random small box that's throwing off your stack of boxes.

    ReplyDelete
  17. Thanks for the great ideas. I LOVE the big stickers on the boxes. I did a similar notebook last time we moved, but used those little dot stickers...NOT a good idea because we lost a bunch of them in the move. So I knew that the medicine was in bedroom box #2...just didn't know which box was #2. These stickers would be MUCH better. We are moving...hopefully soon...as soon as the bank accepts our offer on a short sale here. Would LOVE to have a set of those stickers. Thanks for offering them!!! :) Love your site.

    ReplyDelete
  18. I just posted on my blog about getting my house ready to sell and needing boxes. Thanks for the tip on where to get them! I think my best tip is that you should have an open first box with the must have items in it! Keeping my fingers crossed for those labels!

    ReplyDelete
  19. I love it when you open your Comments, Melissa!

    I have a tip learned the hard way. . . we've moved 10 times over the course of our marriage.

    **Use small, uniform boxes.**

    Rocket science, isn't it? But it is SO much easier to move things if you have many small boxes of the same size and shape. This is especially true if you're like us and have tons (literally) of books, but the same principle applies to most anything you move. With small boxes, you pretty much can't make the box too big to carry. And if the boxes are the same size and shape, they make nice, sturdy stacks in the moving van.

    Great big boxes are useful for things like lampshades and artificial Christmas tree parts. Otherwise, I recommend sticking with small to medium size boxes.

    To be honest, I hope to never need those fabulous, bright moving stickers for myself. I'd like to stay in this house until I have to be carried out. But one of my best friends is about to move, so I could show her your brilliant system and give the stickers to her! So I'd love to win. Thank you for the giveaway!

    ReplyDelete
  20. Too bad I didn't know this BEFORE I packed up our house and put everything in storage for a year. When we get ready to pack and move again next spring, I will for sure be following this ingenious method. THANK YOU!

    ReplyDelete
  21. Great moving ideas, thank you! We will be putting our home on the market within the next few months so I would love to win your stickers for our upcoming move. We haven't moved in almost 15 years so it's a process we're not looking forward to.

    I don't have any great moving tips but I would say if you know you'll be moving soon, start decluttering now. It will make things much easier in the long run.

    ReplyDelete
  22. My mom used to always wrap all of her dishes in all of her towels, blankets.

    ReplyDelete
  23. Great ideas! I'm a single mommy moving into my first house in a short while so this will help. Thanks for the ideas and the giveaway!

    ReplyDelete
  24. My husband is in real estate and we have lived in 5 different houses in our 10 years of marriage. I really need a new packing system. thanks for the tip. oh, and i love those stickers. how handy

    ReplyDelete
  25. Melissa - for anyone that wants to order the stickers, they can go to www.tagaroom.com. Hope that helps someone!!

    p.s. still miss you!

    ReplyDelete
  26. I would love to win those moving stickers! I love all your great ideas.

    ReplyDelete
  27. I don't need the stickers I just moved 2 weeks ago, but one thing that I have learned is to pack a two day bag. In the 2 day bag have 2 pairs of clothes for each person, medicine, bathroom stuff and other stuff that you would need for the 2 days while you are still putting things away. Also enlist family if possible. In my move 2 weeks ago that night we had everything put away and decorations up. Family knows more where you want things than strangers do.

    ReplyDelete
  28. Instead of taking ALL the boxes inside designate the garage as moving central. Divide it into different areas of your house (kitchen, bath, bedrooms) and place all like boxes together. That way instead of tripping over boxes you can just unpack one and then get the next from the garage. I think this would work really well with your system of writing what's in each box, you'd know which boxes need to be unpacked first and which are okay to sit in the garage for a few days :)

    ReplyDelete
  29. My idea is this and I tried to do it last year when we moved but my husband's company packed us.....so I didn't do it as much as would have liked to. When we move this year I will be packing us so I am going to use your idea and also mine, which is.....as you are packing get rid of things you don't need, never use or are broken. Don't hold on to anything that you wouldn't love to see in your next house. And when you unpack get rid of a few more things. Less to pack and less to put away. PS I could really use those stickers!

    ReplyDelete
  30. A couple of moves ago, I knew we were going to have strangers (soon to be friends) unloading our truck, so I got some address lables and made my own room lables similar to what you have here. I printed the names of the rooms in different colors. It made it a lot easier to unload the truck. Then I only had to direct them with furniture pieces. I didn't have the nice inventory list, though. That would have been really helpful! We've tried writing on boxes before, but we found that the place where we wrote was never accessible to see what was in the box, so it was still hard. Having a list would have been great!

    My tip is to pack up the unimportant things in each room as early as possible. Designate one room or place in your house to stack those boxes (we used our formal living room because we could live without that space the easiest). We kept out a few outfits, but packed the rest of the clothes. We kept enough towels to use, but packed the rest. We had sheets on the beds, but packed the rest. etc. By the time you get to the end, you're just left with the essentials which will need to be unpacked first. Then you can specially mark those boxes and they are easy to spot. We marked them with highlighter, but using a bright strip of tape would be faster. So we could go through and unpack the essential boxes quickly and then get the rest of them as we could.

    We're moving again at the end of the school year. I'm enjoying all the moving tips. I'm definitely going to have a notebook this time!

    ReplyDelete
  31. Great moving tip! When we moved last, I made a photo copy of our floor plan and shrunk it. I taped one onto each box and put a red dot in the room where the box belonged. It went SO well - we had all the boxes in the right rooms and it only took our family 30 minutes to unload us from the truck! (If only the actual unpacking went that quickly, right?!)

    ReplyDelete
  32. I just moved across the country and my advice it to let your husband's company send a moving van and packers and it will all go smoothly:) LOL!

    Hey, it worked for me;)

    ReplyDelete
  33. We will be moving this summer - for the very first time in our marriage. Oh boy am I scared.

    ReplyDelete
  34. ooo, ooo, ooo.....our home has been on the market for almost 9 months. Heaven forbid, if it ever sells....I could really use those stickers because oh how I do love organization!!

    ReplyDelete
  35. Oooohh! I love those! My best moving tip? Pack and OPEN ME FIRST box with the following:

    - Coffee pot, filter, and coffee
    - Mugs
    - Towels
    - Shower Curtain
    - Scissors
    - Pet Food Bowls
    - Pet Food
    - Meds
    - Paper Towels

    ReplyDelete
  36. Great Tips! We move every year for my husbands job and that notebook has saved us! Two years ago our storage was broken into and that notebook had everything listed so our insurance paid for everything. Great Reminder and hint for others! Thanks

    ReplyDelete
  37. Use the notebook system when I moved and it worked great! Especially for that stuff you pack up months before you move (china, collectibles, books, albums). There were several times that I had the boxes sitting in the living room and needed one old book for something and I knew exactly where to go to find it! It's a great system.
    Thanks for sharing.

    ReplyDelete
  38. Great stickers!! My tip is to take photos of every room and plan beforehand where each piece of furniture will go, using the pictures as a guide!! It saves time and you know to tell the movers exactly where to put each piece on moving day!

    ReplyDelete
  39. We are finally getting ready to move, house has been on the market for 1 1/2 years UGH!
    I love your idea, I started something similar 1 1/2 years ago with the stuff I didn't need and packed. I pretty much have gotten rid of all that stuff if I didn't need it in this amount of time I didn't need it. I will deffiently be using this idea, now
    MY tip is
    keep your suitcases out and pack them as if you were taking a trip 3-4 days ( I say week because I have 6 kids and it will take longer for us to get organized)
    Everything your family needs for that long of a trip in there suitcases, and pack the suitcases in van just like for a trip. With that and your all important "open me first " box that either goes in your car or last in the truck. with all the home necessities needed for the first 24-48 hours such as TP, paper towels, flashlight, light bulbs ,cleaning supplies, paper plates ,silverware, cups, can opener, medicine, bandaids, screwdriver , hammer, coffee maker, coffee, snacks. You should be doing pretty good.
    I would LOVE those stickers. Maybe my kids could see them and put boxes in the right room.:)
    Another idea make copies of that master list to put in various places in the house so everyone can locate what they want without touching "your" list. (Sorry... again, mom of 6)

    ReplyDelete
  40. I was very organized for a cross country move back in the mid 80's. Every box had a number, every number had an index card with the precise contents of the box. The index cards were stored very neatly in a file box in my car. Somewhere between AZ and KY the file box disappeared. When I got to KY, I had lots and lots of boxes with numbers.....the best laid plans....sigh
    next move, just gonna throw it all in trashbags and if it makes it, it makes it. There won't be any less breakage or choas, I'm sure and maybe the first bag I open will be the one that would never be unpacked and stuck on the top shelf of the garage if labeled and put in a box.
    Good luck in your adventure.

    ReplyDelete
  41. Pick me! I'm packing right now! We move March 1st and I am loving your tips! Wish you had posted this friday. We've already packed up about 20 boxes and would have loved to use your system. I guess better late then never!

    ReplyDelete
  42. i LOVE those stickers! i bet you money that a woman invented those ;)

    As for a moving tip... hmmmm...we've only moved 2 times, but our house is currently on the market, so I guess my best advice would be to make it a point to clean everything out before you pack. If you find stuff and just stuff in into a box, knowing full well that you haven't used it in years then you are just taking up useful space!!!! Pack with a trash bag and a donation bag next to your packing boxes. Then at the end of the day, you'll have the satisfaction of knowing you are actually ONLY packing things that you and your family need and USE. If you've got to pack up anyhow, why not use it as a chance to spring clean?

    Blessings!

    ReplyDelete
  43. I love all your tips Melissa - makes me want to move! Only kidding! My trick was to draw out the new spaces ahead of time and plan for each room like that so I could just tape the blueprint to the door and others could know where things went.
    Take care - love your blog!

    ReplyDelete
  44. I need all the tips you can give! I haven't moved in 10 years but we just closed on a new house Wed and will be moving later this month!!!!

    From 10 years ago all I remember was labeling the boxes so the guys would know exactly where to put them. That way I wouldn't be pulled in all different directions by 8 guys saying "where does this go". We also had our boxes stacked 3 or 4 high so the guys could just slide hand trucks under the stack and GO.

    We'll see how well this move works. ;)

    ReplyDelete
  45. Thanks for the tips! We are moving in a couple of months and I am scared to death! I am not a generally organized type of girl. Luv your blog!

    ReplyDelete
  46. We just moved last week. We got all of our boxes for free. Here is how: Call your local Wal-Mart around 10pm the night before you plan to pick them up. You will need to talk to the manager directly and he will tell you where they will be at. For us they left a couple of carts full in the Site-to-Store area. You have to be able to pick them up before the next shift comes in or they will throw them all out. For us it was around 6:30 in the morning. The boxes that the cereal comes in are ideally sized but it is also nice to have some smaller ones with handles cut in. You can request whatever you want and they will try their best. The boxes get recycled anyway so they don't mind giving them away to be used again. A huge money saver when moving!!!

    ReplyDelete
  47. Melissa, Thank you for helping spread the word about Marky's Auction! There are a number of people who are VERY interested in your online design consultation. (They are being stinkers and waiting to be last minute bidders) It is a FABULOUS service. You are SO talanted and creative. Thank you for helping with Marky's Auction!

    ReplyDelete
  48. Great idea! To pack your china without breakage place a 'foam' paper plate between plates. To protect china cups/bowls place a paper coffee filter between cups/bowls then wrap in paper towel.

    ReplyDelete
  49. we've moved a few times and will be doing it again this summer...with 3 children 6 and under :) my best tips are...

    1) clean out clutter as you pack - don't hesitate!! donate or throw away!
    2) moving notebook - this was the best thing i did during our last move. mine was organized like yours...a number on the box, room it goes in on the box and a description of what's in it goes in the notebook
    3) try to start packing early if possible - set a goal of so many boxes a day and then it's not so overwhelming

    i love those labels!!! much easier than writing it on the box :)

    ReplyDelete
  50. These look great. I would love to win them.

    ReplyDelete
  51. I moved from North Carolina to New Mexico a month and a half ago, and when packing I was just as organised as you were. I wrote down the contents of each box and numbered them .It was such a sanity saver when it came to find stuff when we moved. Walmart and some stores give away boxes for free because they will anyways recycle them, so they don't mind people having it. Be sure to ask the manager first.
    Love your blog
    Mamta

    ReplyDelete
  52. How cool and I thought I was the only one who marks the boxes by numbers and has a moving notebook! LOL
    Great idea for the boxes! I checked several companies online and found that U haul had cheap ones but I think you beat that price already with Home Depot.

    ReplyDelete

Thank you for taking the time to leave me a note!