Move-In Advice

I consider myself a very organized person, so as I was packing up all of our belongings at the old house, everything was done with organization in mind and my focus was on packing things and labeling them so that I would have as stress-free time as possible unpacking once we arrived at the new house.

Regardless of how organized I tried to be, the fact of the matter was that I still ended up staring at a garage full of cardboard boxes, feeling very overwhelmed. We had the movers place some boxes in their designated rooms, but we had gone to storage on our own, making several trips with boxes prior to the movers coming in an attempt to cutting down on their time and thus the size of the check that I would be writing. It sure did pay off - they quoted us 6 hours originally and had everything moved and in at the 3-hour mark. However, as I mentioned, I was left staring at a garage of intimidating boxes.
 Here is where my (simplistic) advice comes in. I was really able to become most productive once my family and I took to the garage, putting signs up around the perimeter walls - one for each room. Being 6 months pregnant right now, my job was to label the appropriate place on the wall, then direct everyone else moving the boxes to the correct label. Within 45 minutes or so, we had a much more organized area to work from and could then tackle individual rooms in a very organized manner. I knew that night that I wanted to tackle baby rooms, so it was easy to ask helpers to go to the garage and only bring in the boxes in the 'baby room section'.



While this is such simplistic advice, I highly recommend it. It was at that point that we became ultra-productive and in less than 24 hours had 90% of the boxes unpacked, contents put away, and boxes broken down.