So, I just moved to a new place. It’s literally 400 yards from my old one—our lease was up, and my roomies and I happened to see a really great new house right around the corner, adjacent to [and owned by the owner of!] our absolute favorite cafe. We even moved some of our smaller furniture by hand, walking it down the street while onlookers heckled us.
Now, as I’ve mentioned before, I’ve moved an inordinate number of times since graduating high school, and every time I undergo a horrible anxiety about the amount of belongings I have, damning myself again and again for possessing anything at all, and swearing I’ll never move with this amount of stuff again.
I haven’t succeeded in paring down my possessions to the point where they’ll all fit into a steamer trunk, as my good friend Chris has come pretty damn close to doing, but I’ve got my pre-move organization routine streamlined down to a two-and-a-half day process. Yes, it’s borderline superhuman; no, it’s not impossible for you. Read on!
- Assess your new space. Take into account what you know you need there—and more importantly, what you know you won’t. Remember when I wrote about making your own style inspiration guide? Use the same guidelines to make an apartment style guide. Check ApartmentTherapy for inspiration. When you’ve got a really good idea of what you want your new place to feel like and what function you want each room or area to serve, then you can start making decisions about what you need or don’t need there. For me, this meant giving away a sewing table [my basement already had workspace tables and shelving included] and picking up some extra lamps [my bedroom, the smallest room in the attic, has only the dimmest of lighting fixtures and no natural light]. For my roommates and me collectively, it meant getting rid of extra cups and bowls [the fact that we had a whole lot meant we could literally go days at a time without doing dishes, and that was a habit we wanted to break].
- Get rid of old things, broken things, duplicate things, and things you don’t use anymore. These are items that don’t belong in your home in any circumstance. If you don’t/can’t/won’t use something, there’s no reason to put any effort into packing it and bringing it with you on your move. If you have two toasters or two sewing machines or two vacuum cleaners, you can only possibly use one [with rare exception, of course].
- Also, purge anything that doesn’t belong in the space you’re creating. This can be anything from letters from old boyfriends to an armchair that’s never quite been entirely comfortable, from the pants that are so cute but too short for you to the ceramic kitten your mum gave you when you were eight that you don’t like, but can’t bear to get rid of. Don’t hang onto anything out of guilt, whether it’s guilt about giving away the presents you got from people who care about you or about getting rid of something that’s in great condition, if you’d ever get around to using it. Guess what—if you own something and you don’t use it, you’re only keeping it from moving on to its next home with someone who really will. Let go and move on.
- Put like with like. Pack [and label!] boxes based on what they contain, where they came from in your old house, and where they’ll be in your new one. I will warn you, though: if you don’t have a decently useful home organizing scheme in place, this is exceedingly hard to to. It’s worth it to put a system in place before you put your things in boxes—trying to sort through a slew of stuff haphazardly jumbled together in packing boxes is hellacious.Do it now, and save yourself the trouble.
- Don’t pack anything dirty, broken, or not in working order. I know this should be self-explanatory, but this was the only rule of my own that I broke. Before you pack something, fix it. Clean it. Make it work. Or if you can’t, get rid of it. Case in point where I failed last month: it really blows to arrive in your new place and immediately have to do laundry just so you have some clean pyjamas for bed. [Yes, I packed dirty clothes into suitcases. Yuck, I know. I'll never do it again. I promise.]
- Be prepared to declutter as you unpack, too. All the careful decluttering in the world can still leave you with too much stuff. If you’ve taken measurements of the room and planned the layout, good for you, but your case is a rare one. When you see that something doesn’t fit, deal with it immediately—list it on Craigslist or call a local secondhand shop to come pick it up. If you don’t deal with it immediately, you’ll be more likely to allow it to stay, even though you know it doesn’t belong in your new home.
Do you all have a pre-moving packing ritual? Are you a neat packer or a messy packer? Any awesome or hilarious stories about packing/unpacking shenanigans? Please share!
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