Old-Fashioned Motherhood

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.

Moving Box 1

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.)

Moving Box 2

3) Box contents…

I write just a word or two directly on the box of what is in the box. 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. And when “crunch time” comes at the very end, we just re-label willy-nilly.

Stack of Boxes

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 will be in a book, but right now, I’m just concentrating on getting through Move #19!

*whew*

This entry was posted on Saturday, January 5th, 2008 at 10:57 am and is filed under A Mother's Daily Log. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.