The Art of the Box
As I've said before, we're planning to move. So, having
heard friends’ stories about what their friends told them, before we even hired
a realtor I started to pack. Not only would that get a lot of excess “stuff”
out of the way and make things look better, I felt I was getting a jump on
things. After all, I could pack and purge at the same time. Trust me, the
purging is easier.
Boxes
First, you have to decide about the boxes. I have book
boxes, which have openings on the end so you can pick them up more easily once
they’re filled, and separate tops so it’s easier to close them up—maybe.
Packing books isn’t that hard, especially when you can then make bags of books
to donate to either the library or Goodwill, which takes almost anything. But
those boxes get heavy really fast. As in, I would fill them, close them, and
then just leave them on the floor for Ed to move. My lifting abilities are
limited. But I also tried to pack by category—fiction in one box, general
nonfiction in another, unneeded accounting boxes in a third. I think I had 15
boxes of books done in three days. Sometimes I’d fill a bottom box, put another
one on top, and then put a third on top, just to preserve space.
Then there are boxes for other materials. I have good-sized
medium ones for the dining room. And I had direction from a mover I spoke to on
how to pack dishes, knickknacks, etc. it was time consuming but bending over is
good for the waist—or so I’ve been told. Those boxes get heavier even faster. Packing
dishes is an interesting effort and a lot of packing paper is involved. I worked
out a deal with the hubby—I packed, labeled, and closed. He provided the raw
strength to move them. He swears that at least one of the boxes weighed over 60
pounds. I’m not sure of that, but then again, I try not to lift a lot. Ever see
someone steer a full box down the hall into a storage space? You can either
push it, which sometimes doesn’t work well, or push it with a foot, which has
benefits as stress relief. Of course, once I got it to the other room I couldn’t
get it onto the pile.
Packing Order
Second, there is the decision on what to pack first. I started
to pack linens early, because it was spring, I wanted the winter stuff out of
the way, and I thought it would be easier to just have the summer/early fall
stuff around. I even packed some of the towels—when you have three linen
closets you end up with a lot of towels, even after you’ve given away a lot of
them. I think the towels may have given birth to more towels when we weren’t
looking and decisions to sever families of them were difficult.
And then there was my husband’s blanket, which we have named
Puffy. It’s a king-sized down comforter, which can be folded and stuffed into a
box, and closed. Except when I came back to the room the tape was coming off
and the blanket was trying to get out—it was the only item in that box. I sat
on top of it and put on more tape. It was still trying to get out. Ultimately,
I stacked a bigger box on top of it and weighted that down with more linens to
keep the box closed. I’m still afraid the blanket will get out. It’s the stuff
of nightmares.
Third, I have loaded every knickknack I could find; someone
told me that when the house goes on the market some viewers can have slightly
sticky fingers so you have to get everything put away. I’m not sure that’s true
but I packed them up. That includes in the dining room, where I had a hutch
with shelves in it and “tchotchkes” on every shelf. I got rid of a couple of
bowls but on the whole most of the items came from various travels and I wanted
to keep them. That meant wrapping everything in paper, and then filling the
empty spots in the box (which I’ve carefully lined with crunched up paper to
give it a softer bottom) with more paper. When we got to unwrap it all, and
trust me, that won’t be a fast job, I’ll need a box just to hold the paper that
won’t be needed anymore. It won’t be pretty.
But then you have to have a place to put all the boxes. I
solved that issue by putting a really old couch on Freecycle. That went quickly
and voila—space for boxes. Many, many boxes. If you go into that room now, it’s
a two-deep wall of boxes that’s 3 boxes high—I would have gone deeper but the
room was getting too full. Plus, we now have boxes in the garage—only a single
layer deep, but four boxes high. After all, in theory we really do still need
to put the cars in too. I think.
Stacked Up
We ended up with 50-plus boxes, plus some bins that can be
just wrapped in tape and loaded as is. After I was done with the dining room I
walked in and said to my husband, “That’s it. Someone else is doing the
kitchen.” He looked at me and decided that the best answer would be “Okay.” I’m
told it will be 21 boxes for the kitchen, and I don’t know how many more for
the basement and other spots that I couldn’t handle.
I don’t want to see another box to pack again if I can avoid
it—I probably can’t. I still have a lot of packing paper around and will figure
out how to deal with that another time. In the meantime, anyone need bubble
wrap?
Next time: Talking to moving companies.
