I am so excited to have Laura from Cyberforward.com here today. She is a fellow military spouse and has many military moves under her belt. Laura has agreed to share some of her tips on staying organized during a move.
I have been an Air Force spouse for 20 years… and counting. Due to my husband’s career our family has had the opportunity to see the world! However, with that blessing comes the curse of having to move into a different house or apartment 16 times. While we’ve “only” had 12 assignments, occasionally we moved to a different dwelling during an assignment. When we lived in Okinawa, Japan we moved 2 times: once from an off-base apartment to base housing (I did that one alone 6 weeks after arriving in Japan-he was in Saudi Arabia), and then we chose to move to a larger base house about a year later. What was I thinking?
Since I have 16 moves under my belt, I will share a few of my favorite moving tips. Let me start off by saying that I have developed a type of decorating that consists of minimal knick-knacks, few items hanging on the walls, and even fewer nice pieces of furniture. I do have an occasional moment of weakness and buy a nice item, for instance, a beautiful flower arrangement or wreath. It takes one male mover and a small box for my beautiful treasure to be smashed before it’s arrival at our next location. If your family moves a lot, you can definitely relate to this!
Even though I don’t invest a lot into decorating my home, somehow we still have a lot of stuff! My husband’s rule of thumb is if it isn’t bolted down then we sell it before the move, so we don’t have to unpack it on the other end. Due to this mentality, we purge our home of stuff a few weeks before the moving date. We have a yard sale (so my husband can sell everything we own besides the kids) and we are then left feeling as if we made a little headway.
Our next step is to designate a room, closet, and/or kitchen cabinet as a “DO NOT PACK” area. We do this a week before the movers arrive so we can quickly set aside things we know we don’t want packed: clothes, suitcases, important documents, toys/electronics for the kids, etc. We make it clear to the movers that those rooms are not to be packed by putting signs on the doors that say “DO NOT PACK”. Having a designated “off limits” area makes it easier to set aside those items without actually having to pack them right away. Once the movers take our household goods, we typically stay in the empty house for a few days in order to clean the house for the next tenants. It’s then, we pack all the items we have set aside. It makes the packing process less stressful for us because we aren’t worried about the movers packing things we will need before we see our household goods again. We have learned this lesson the hard way with medical records.
On the other end of the move, we dread the day the movers arrive at our new location. It’s then we find out what items made the move and what didn’t. Once our new home is full of boxes from floor to ceiling, my husband regrets not having a bigger yard sale. We then start the unpacking process one box at a time.
Over the years, I have learned to save any and all decorating for the very end of the unpacking process. Many holes have been put in walls, only to be patched up because I was too eager to decorate and hung pictures prematurely. Unpack everything, make sure your furniture is in the right spot, and THEN decorate to make your home YOUR home…until it’s time to move again.
With retirement right around the corner, my husband is trying to refrain from accumulating any more moves. We are trying to hold out for the “big one”, when we eventually find our retirement home. At that point, I will be consulting Wendy for some long overdue decorating advice and purchases!
Laura
Laura is an Air Force wife and mother to 3 children ages 16 to 6. She writes a blog for parents of teens called Cyber Forward. She currently lives in Yorktown, Virginia.