Mom and I are moving next week, from North Central Florida to central New York state. I’ll write more about it when I have time; I definitely will, as I’ll be spending a few days in a hotel while I wait for the moving company to show up with my stuff. Meanwhile, I wanted to share a packing method I came up with.
Someone had suggested to me that I use a spiral notebook as a packing log. Each room gets a letter, and each box gets a number. So G-14 would be the 14th box destined for my bedroom. Easy enough. I would write down what was in the box as I packed it, so that I’d be able to find anything once I got to the new apartment.
I decided to throw in a bit of tech. I own two Rocketbooks (reusable notebooks that pair with a phone app. It can scan to PDF and/or a text file transcription. The transcription software is very well done, and can read my messy handwriting with few mistakes). I don’t use them often, because I enjoy the sensory experience of good pens on nice paper, but I realized the Rocketbooks would be great for our packing logs. I handed one Rocketbook to Mom, and took the other for myself.
Every few days I scan our handwritten logs into the Rocketbook app, then open the transcription file and copy/paste everything into a Google spreadsheet. It’s shared with Mom. Updating it only takes a few minutes. The beautiful thing about it is that I can do a text search for anything I’ve packed and know immediately what box it’s in.
While I’m trying to pack like items together, when you get down to the last things in a room you sometimes have odds and ends that all fit in one box. By writing down each thing in the box, I can easily find out that, for example, my wooden niddy noddy (a tool for winding yarn into a skein) is in the box with my tarot cards. (Actual example.) And the box is G-26.
Boxes that have things that need to be opened immediately, like bedding for our first night in the new place, also get a giant asterisk on them. And for my own sorting, boxes of yarn or fiber (of which there are many) get a Y on them too (like G-05-Y). That way I can group them in my bedroom easily.
I definitely recommend this process. It’s going to make unpacking so much easier!
0 Comments