Moving Tips

Hubs and I finally got around to debriefing the move. Here are our notes on what went well and what needs to go better next time. We moved about an hour away and we had about a two week overlap between places so we could move most of our things slowly.

Things to Improve

Communication. I thought I told Hubs to pack certain things or to do things and he didn't hear me. We had planned to treat our helpers to lunch and one of them didn't hear us so we were worried about him when he didn't show up. He had stopped at Burger King to get himself lunch. Hubs also packed some of the things that I wanted to throw out.

One of the things I thought I told Hubs was that we should number the boxes and make an index. Hubs did not. When we moved in we weren't really sure where important things were (like batteries and light bulbs). Next time we'll put special stickers on the boxes with important things on them so we know to open those first.

We'll also want to label the furniture so our helpers know which room it should go in.

We need to keep the house better organized in order to pack better and we need to Stop hoarding things in our basement and keep the basement organized so that we can pack it better. Our basement at our old place ended up a pile of trash.

Make a list of things to pack last then pack everything else. Don't save too much for the last day. We rented a moving truck for the last Saturday in our old place. We went back Sunday and still had two carloads of things to bring up because we left a number of things for the last minute. Hubs didn't want to be living out of a suitcase surrounded by boxes so we didn't pack up a lot of stuff until the last minute. We ended up just throwing things in reusable grocery bags and trash bins because we had run out of boxes and couldn't get out to buy more.

Hire cleaners to clean the new place (and maybe the old). We spent a couple of days cleaning our new place (it was incredibly filthy in some of the out of the way places). Then we had to spend a day scrubbing our old apartment. It would have been so much easier if we had, had more help with this. Plus, in our new place while brining furniture in we tracked in so much dirt so sweeping and mopping had been kind of pointless and that time would have been better spent dusting walls and cleaning hard to reach places that wouldn't have gotten dirty again.

Take a trip to the hardware store before moving everything in to get plungers*, fresh cleaning cleaning supplies (I did not want to move our old toilet brush and I wanted a new broom for the upstairs), tools you'll need in the new house like two to three prong outlet converters, and anything else that you'll need new in the new place right away.

Hire movers. My back was too sore to lift things by the end of our big moving day. Hubs back gave out sometime the next week.

Good Things

Mover's plastic wrap was the best thing ever.
As I noted earlier, I used it to seal up bins without tops and wrap shoe boxes together into large bundles. We used it to wrap plastic drawers in and keep the furniture pads on our few nice pieces of furniture.

We cleaned our bathroom and bedroom before we moved in so when we moved in the most important parts of the house were clean.

Yeah for stock pilling paper towels. We haven't had enough rags to do all the cleaning we need to do so, despite our environmentalist tendencies (we wash and reuse ziplock bags), we've been really happy to have tons of paper towels.

I have a hard time focusing on the positives.

Any other suggestions about how to make a move go smoothly?

*One of our helpers had trouble with our toilet. He was able to solve the problem with a stick but then he left the "poop" stick in a trash bag in our bathroom. (We suggested he throw it in the creek in our backyard but he didn't want to do that.) We didn't have an outside garbage bin yet so it had to stay there until we could get one. Ugh.