How to Move: the organized way.

You may have noticed the large gap of posts between October of last year and January of this year. That's because my husband and I bought our first house and moved into it last November! It was very exciting, but I was really busy packing and signing endless papers everyday throughout escrow. But overall, our move was relatively quick and organized.
For some background, my husband and I got married and moved into our first apartment in April of last year. It took a while to get our apartment setup and figure out what should go where. But after a few months, it looked great and we loved it. And then we found a house we loved more and we made an offer on it. It was a short sale, so we figured we'd make an offer and maybe hear back from the bank in 4-9 months and maybe we'd get it, maybe we wouldn't, but we'd be okay either way. The bank accepted out offer within a month and while we thought we would have a 60 day escrow, the bank wanted 30 days. So our plan of moving in 6-12 months became less than 60 days from the date we made the offer. There was no lack of stress during the escrow process with extra mortgage out on the house and liens on the property that were unknown until the middle of escrow. The only thing we could do was keep packing and hope it worked out. And pray.

Our Apartment

Because we had just finished setting up our apartment, I decided that if we had to move it had to be quick, easy and organized. I searched the internet for tips on how to move, but there wan't much out there. I read the blog of one woman who had to move across the country. She had suggested making list of the contents of your boxes and numbering them so you can find stuff easily while you're moving. I took this idea and built off that.


I started by making spreadsheets and labels for my lists and labeling the boxes. You can download them here: spreadsheets and labels for kitchen, living room, and garage and labels for bedrooms.
I printed one list for each room in our new house plus a few extra and several sheets of labels for each room. Because we have so many books, games, dvds, and records, we used the living room labels the most.
Since we were hiring movers to move us, I added our names and phone numbers to the labels in case a box got misplaced along the way.
 As I started packing, I mentally planned what I wanted to go in each room of our new house. I packed items that would go together in the same box so that when I unpacked, the items quickly went from box to shelf/drawer/closet/etc.
We start packing about a month before our move since we could only pack in the evenings and weekends. I started by packing the things we used most infrequently (grandma's china, wall art, vases, nik naks, books)  and donated or threw away the stuff we were never using again. Good Will received an entire trash bag full of purses I never used anymore.

As I packed each box, I wrote down what was in it. I didn't list every single item, unless it was important, frequently used, or valuable. That way, if a box did get lost, I knew exactly how much to charge the moving company and because the boxes were numbered in order, it would be easy to see if one was missing. For the most part, I just listed the main idea of what was in the boxes: Computer Desk Drawer Contents, Jewelry, Large Purses, Paperback Books, etc.
After I packed each box and wrote down what was inside, I put the number on three labels and put one label on the top and two on opposite sides of the box so that I could see the labels even with stuff is piled on top of it. One moving company suggested we put all our boxes in one place near our front door so that the movers could easily access them. This sped up our moving day and kept us from having boxes stacked in every single room. Although, we had quite a mountain of boxes by the time we moved. I left our clothes and kitchen until the last week. Our clothes went into our suitcases, which kept the clothes from getting dirty and gave our suitcases a purpose so they weren't just bulky items to move.
On moving day (which was of course pouring rain), the movers came and loaded all the boxes and furniture into the truck. While they loaded everything up, I clean out our fridge and freezer and packed it all in our coolers. My parents came and took some of our my fragile and lightweight items. I left our vacuum and some cleaning supplies at our apartment to be used and picked up the next day.
When the movers left, I went to our house and unloaded to extra stuff that I had taken over in our car and then I started directing the moving guys on where all our furniture went. Once they started bringing boxes in, they just followed the labels on where each box belonged.
We started unpacking right away. The movers brought wardrobe boxes for us to use, which was great because all our hanging clothes went straight from closets to boxes to closets without needing to be put on hangers again. Our clothes went right from suitcases, which I packed in order so that all my shirts were in one suitcase, pants in another, his shirts in one and pants in another, etc, into shelves in our closet or drawers in the dresser. Because it was on my list, I knew exactly which boxes had our clean sheets and comforter for our bed and all the contents of our night stands. We unpacked our bedroom in less than an hour.
Our friends came over and helped unpack our books, records, and games in our living room. They all went straight onto shelves, so that was easy enough. My biggest mistake there was loosing the little pegs that held the shelves in the bookcase. After we found them, most of our living room could be unpacked.

I took pictures of our new kitchen with all the doors open during the home inspection. Later, I faded the pictures in on the computer and wrote on top of the pictures where I wanted to put everything. This helped me plan ahead so I wasn't left guessing what I should do with everything once we got there. I had laid shelf paper down before we moved so everything could go straight into the cabinets.

I packed up everything in our bathroom the night before we moved. It was all in two boxes and was pretty easy to put straight into the cabinet or the shower. Unfortunately, the bathrooms in our house are much smaller than the ones in our apartment, so we had to use the hallway closets to store extra bottles of shampoo, sun block, toilet paper, etc, but I bought some storage boxes and organized it all, so it's much easier to find everything now.



Once the bedroom, living room, and kitchen were done, we could relax a little more. The rest of our stuff was put away over the next few weeks and we had unpacked every last box in less than a month.
For wall art, I started by laying out paintings and photos on the ground, leaning them against the wall where I wanted them. Once I was settled on where I wanted everything to go, I went on a hanging frenzy. I made my  hanging kit and just want around measuring, marking, nailing, and hanging until everything was were I wanted it. I'll write another post about my hanging techniques sometime in the future, since I've had a lot of people ask me how I do it.
We moved in on November 17th and on December 15th, we had an awesome Christmas/housewarming party with our friends and family. We also got the largest Christmas tree possible :-)