This month’s blog post is about moving apartments. I have personally moved 7 times in the last 10 years to various apartments during college as well as the past few years as a young professional. I have learned a lot along the way and wanted to share these tips with you!

Before Moving

• Go through each room of your apartment and donate, recycle, or get rid of things you are no longer using. One of the highest impact things I did before moving was an inventory of all my clothes and donated those I don’t wear often but are still in good condition.
• Start saving boxes and weekly paper circulars. These are typically great materials to box your items in. Personally, I started saving all the boxes from Chewy that our dog’s food came in and used them to pack clothes and shoes.
• If you have plastic bins like we did, prioritize packing liquids in these in case any items spill.
• For all containers, generally pack the heaviest items at the bottom to distribute the weight.
• Use space within boxes wisely. This is where you can get creative to fill boxes and spaces! Some of the things we incorporated were packing socks into our shoes and filling the InstaPot with spices as shown in the photo below.
• Pack a go-bag and make it stand out from the rest of the boxes. Our go-bag was our smallest suitcase and it included toothbrushes, toilet paper, pain medication, clothes for two days, and toiletries.

During / Day-of Move

• If moving yourself, make sure to stack heavier boxes at the bottom of the moving truck. If you hire movers, I recommend having at least one water bottle for each mover. We also made a box of snacks for them.
• Have more tape than you think you need. We used extra tape on the day of to secure dresser drawers and label any boxes that we may have forgotten to label.

Post Move

• Prioritize making your bed. Chances are, you won’t get through unpacking all the boxes in one day, so making your bed should be one of your top priorities behind unpacking any freezer or refrigerator items. Similar to our go bag, I made sure this was a unique box as well so that it was easy to find once we got to the new apartment
• 2nd priority would be the kitchen utensils and tools so that you are able to make food either that night or the next morning. This is a lesson learned from me because I didn’t do this and spent the next morning searching for our silverware and bowls so that I could have cereal and milk.

Other important tips as part of moving process:

• Reminder to update your address for things like voting, driver’s license, credit cards, etc.
• If you are able to have the apartments overlap in time by at least a week, I would recommend doing so. As shown in the first photo, we did this and it was so much nicer to be able to clean an empty apartment rather than trying to clean around all our stuff in boxes (and our dog wanting our constant attention).
• Start and stop utilities at each place – From my experience, this should be done at least a week out. Things like Verizon usually require to call to cancel, but for most other utilities you can stop services online.

Do you have any questions about the moving apartments? If so, please feel free to reach out to us at DaniTheEngineer.Blog@gmail.com with your specific questions and leave them as a comment below this post!