Moving-- Part One

My husband and I have moved 18 times in our 15 years of marriage-- and no, that is not a typo, it's a cold, hard fact.We're now moving again.*sigh*

But what better time of year to move than at the beginning, right? We will be "starting over" with a new house, a new church congregation, new friends. We're excited for the adventure!

Since we have become "experts" at moving, I thought I'd share some of our moving system here:

1) Color coding is key.
I assign each room of the new home a color, and use small, round, colored stickers on the boxes. For example, orange is for the family room, green is for the living room, yellow for the kitchen, and so on.


2) Labels are our friends!
I place a white, rectangular sticker with the name of the assigned room in the upper left-hand corner of each side of every box. I place the round, colored sticker on the white label, and write the room's name on the blank white area. (This is probably over-kill, and not necessary to write both the name and have the colored sticker, too, but I'm a very visual person, and I appreciate the double-coverage.)

3) Box contents.
You can also number the boxes and then assign a 3X5 card to each box, writing the color and number at the top, then writing ALL the contents in pencil, and filing all the finished cards in a 3X5 recipe box. This makes it easy to know exactly what the contents of each box are. I always try to keep similar items together, which will be a blessing once we arrive at the new house and have to live out of the boxes for a while. Since we have moved so often, we have many of the same boxes from the last few moves. I do try to stick with what was already packed in those boxes so that the labels don't have to change, but that's not always possible. (Hence recording the contents on the cards in pencil!) And when "crunch time" comes at the very end, we just re-label willy-nilly.

Well, that should do it for today. We've just started packing last week, and have another week and a half before the big day. I'll post again, and share more moving tips. Someday, all of these tips should be in a book, but right now, I'm just concentrating on getting through Move #19!

*whew*