Make Your Moving Day Easier

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So you’re moving, and the question remains: now what?  Do you do it yourself, or do you pay someone else.  Good question.  Probably the most important one.  It’s completely acceptable for an average-sized home to have upwards of a hundred boxes.  That requires a lot of manpower, not to mention vehicle space, to transport all of it.

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First and foremost, a couple things have to be established:

  • How big is your move? Are you downsizing or upsizing?  How many rooms are you moving into how many rooms?
  • How strong are you? This is a serious question.  Depending on your age, your health, and your overall stamina, moving will take its toll.  Are you ready for that?
  • Have you done the math? Moving always winds up being more expensive than you plan on.  It usually starts with the shipping boxes.  You think you will only need twenty but you wind up needing forty.  How about gas, tipping the movers buying your helpers dinner…

After you’ve answered those questions, hopefully with the advice of some friends weighing in, you can decide if you are going to do your own move or not.  If you have decided to hire movers, make sure you’ve done your research and read good reviews.  If you are have decided to do your own move, here are a couple tips to help you save time, money, and energy:

  • Use shipping boxes to pack your stuff in. Boxes designed to go through the mailing system are usually a better quality cardboard and more enforced.
  • Go through your belongings and get rid of what you don’t need. If you enough to get rid of you could even host a garage sale and earn some money towards the move.
  • You can save on moving supplies by finding or purchasing used items. You shouldn’t have a hard time finding used shipping boxes from local stores or that someone else is trying to sell on Craigslist.
  • Mark your boxes on the top and the sides. Be descriptive! Label the room they are being moved into, and what they are holding (Kitchen: hand towels, Scentsy burner, mixing spoons).
  • If you don’t feel comfortable, or interested in, driving your own moving truck, you can at least save a lot of money by loading it yourselves. There are plenty of companies that will drop off a truck and then come back to get it after you’ve loaded it.
  • Pack everything tightly, using enough padding. Make sure not to pack too heavy, so don’t use bigger boxes for books or kitchenware.  Be sure to label if a box is fragile!

What Pinterest Has to Say About Cardboard Boxes

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Do not go on Pinterest if you want to continue feeling good about yourself.  Do go on Pinterest if you want see how talented, creative, and apparently wealthy everyone else is.

Of course I’m just kidding.  Pinterest is a wonderful resource, and if you treat it for what it is (namely, an internet website), you can walk away without hating yourself.  It’s true that there are now new forms of depression and obsession that have developed solely because of social media, and that makes sense.  They call them “Pinterest fails” for a reason.  And have you ever seen any of those?  Hilarious!  But honestly, if we embraced the components of our own lives we might be able to give some of those creative, witty, and resourceful Pinterest ideas a try!

If you simply type in “cardboard boxes” you will immediately see pin after pin of awesome looking DIY cardboard toys.  Okay, let’s stop there.  I said “give some of these try”.  Not “replicate them to perfection”.  The fact is that we aren’t starting out with the same resources of whomever that even created what they have posted (starting at our brains), so we can automatically start to assume that our project will NOT come up looking the same.  And that’s okay.

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Do you have some cardboard boxes?  If you do, awesome.  You are one step closer to attempting a cool Pinterest idea.  So, you type in “cardboard boxes”.  You can make a pirate ship or a mailbox.  If you have a ton of them you can tape them all together and make a maze.  You can make a marble labyrinth game, which actually gave me an idea… I took some old cardboard boxes that were in the burn pile and cut them down so that they were trays.  I squirted different colors of paint on the bottom.  Tossed in a couple of black walnut pods and taught the children how to hold and tip the tray so that the black walnuts would roll through the paint and create a very Jackson Pollock-esque painting.

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Don’t have kids?  Dress up the boxes with cloth and rope and turn it all into a beautiful storage box, or any number of organizational containers.  Don’t even want to make anything, you were trying to find those subscription boxes and you couldn’t remember what they were called for the life of you?  Those pop up, too (and they are my favorite).  I want to try all of those subscription boxes… but I don’t want to spend thousands of dollars, and that would just happen.

Cheap Moving Boxes or Bust

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Cheap moving boxes are a must for the moving process.  With how expensive the entire moving process is, it is essential that the packing materials be of a decent price.  After all, you only wind up using them once, so what’s the point in spending a lot of money on them?  It isn’t entirely necessary to invest in the really expensive, really heavy duty boxes.  Maybe for heaviest stuff, like the kitchen supplies and books, but for the most part our belongings don’t wind up weighing that much and they don’t need triple reinforced corrugated cardboard to get them point A to point B without mishap.

Many companies boast that they are selling cheap moving boxes, but it is helpful to make some comparisons between providers before deciding who, in fact, is actually doing so and is, therefore, the best fit for your investment.

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Let’s completely take local, through the door type stores off the table.  It is safe to say these places are not going to be offering you the most bang for our buck.  These companies have to pay the middle-man and so their products are going to be priced higher than what you want.  They might be a good resource for your simple packaging and shipping needs, but not for something as huge as a move.

Which brings us to on-line providers.  On-line providers are the middle man that the local companies have to compensate for, which is why you are going to get a better deal.  There is no need to cover the costs of shipping to the local stores and all that jazz.  The product will be shipped directly to your door!

First and foremost, online companies offer bulk products at wholesale prices.  This is the first thing that you need to compare.  How much product is coming with what price?  Don’t be fooled by lower dollars.  One place could offer twenty-five boxes for twenty-five dollars.  Another place could offer twenty boxes for twenty-one dollars.  You might be originally attracted to the idea of saving four bucks, but you will find that you are losing a “free” box at that price.  Now, if they are selling twenty boxes at nineteen dollars, that’s the better deal!

Secondly, make sure that shipping costs aren’t going to negate all of the saving that you worked hard to configure.  Most of these companies offer free shipping, but some of them won’t.  At the same time, a lot of them will offer coupon codes for free shipping that are easy to come across.  Either way, when looking for cheap moving boxes make sure that is what you wind up with!

Using Packaging Supplies to Create a Unique Unboxing Experience

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Everyone loves to get something in the mail.  Of course I’m referring to something fun, and not the un-fun stuff like bills and spam.  That should go without saying, of course… I was talking to my neighbor the other day and she was saying that even when she orders something for herself she still feels excited waiting for it.  When she gets home from work and sees that the box has arrived her heart skips a beat.  There’s just something about it.  Tearing the heavy, outer layer.  Needing special tools to do so (and I’m talking about scissors, of course).  You’ve gotta work for it!  You see your name on it.  Then you get to the inside packaging.  This can be a let-down, or it can be another step to prolong the delicious process.  It all depends on the packaging supplies you use.

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Like buttoned!  Yes, I said buttons.  Buttons look just like candy.  A bright, thick pop of color that you really want to take a bite out of but you know you shouldn’t (but you still might try anyway).  After you’ve boxed up your precious cargo, whatever it may be, use some white string to wrap around it, threading it through the button with each pass, and then tie a bow right above the button at the end.  There are tutorials on-line for how to do this, so don’t write it off immediately.  Even if you are using a simple paper bag to wrap something, make small dots on it with a silver Sharpie, and then use the string and button trick.  You will find yourself adding these simple do-dads to your packaging supplies list!

The longer you can drag out the unboxing experience, the better.  I’m not talking about a Christmas present prank, where you have a box in a box in a box in a box, or an entire roll of tape wrapped around a gift card.  I’m talking about clean lines and bright colors and thoughtfulness.  It’s all about the thoughtfulness.

Like tissue paper!  Is tissue paper a necessary part of packaging supplies?  Not at all.  But it is a thoughtful one.  Wrap what you are sending in some tissue paper and you will be simultaneously sending the message that you want the recipient to look at this like a gift.  “Here you go, unwrap this.”  It’s like saying, what’s inside?  Even though you already know.

What Good Are Cheap Moving Boxes?

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That’s more or less a rhetorical question.  Cheap moving boxes are amazing, and awesome, and super convenient.  So they are obviously a lot of good (not sure if that that statement is grammatically correct, but I’m going to go with it).

The next question would be this: what is the difference cheap moving boxes and expensive moving boxes?  I mean, why not have them all the same for an incredibly low and feasible price?  Well, there are a couple reasons as to why this is the way it is.  One of them has to do with money.  Actually, all of them have to do with money.

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Usually it’s the name brands that are the more expensive, and they generally tend to be the better quality.  U-Haul can afford to make really strong boxes because they bring in a lot of cash.  And they bring in even more cash from selling their really strong boxes and really strong prices.  Ridiculous prices, in fact.  And people will continue spending the ridiculous prices because they know U-Haul and they know they have a lot of money and can afford to put out a reliable product.  Is this making sense?  Not only that, you know that when you are dealing with a big company like U-Haul you are likely to have great customer service and also to be well compensated if something doesn’t work out well.  This is because they have the extra funds to compensate you sufficiently, instead of just the “I’m sorry”, or even the “I don’t really care”, from the lower income companies that make the cheap moving boxes.

But I mean, a box is a box is a box, you know.  I gravitate towards the less expensive kinds because I’m dealing with cardboard boxes.  If I wanted to buy an Xbox One I probably wouldn’t go the cheap route because I want the warranty and all the safety precautions.  If I’m spending a ton of money on something that I intend on using for an extended period of time (i.e. years) than I am going to go the extra mile to ensure the least amount of problem.  This isn’t a reality when it comes to boxes, which is why I will always go with the cheap ones.  It’s just boxes.  So I will order cheap moving boxes from a tiny online reality and chalk it up to the fact that I’m dealing with cardboard with one of them bends or breaks.