I had a very busy September working on projects that were NOT related to our home renovation. I finished that up on the morning of September 30th, so that left us approximately 2.5 days to pack up our entire house!
That's not to say we didn't do any of the packing beforehand. I sorted and cleaned out much of my art studio and we had made initial inroads on starting to pack up the kitchen, but in the scheme of the whole house, that was just a drop in the bucket.
Things we learned:
- We own too much stuff. We took this opportunity to sort out as much as we could and donate used items to either Goodwill or Habitat ReStore. We will be doing a second culling as we unpack our belongings back into our house.
- When you think you're almost done, you still have hours of work ahead. It looked like we had packed up the bulk of the house with only a "little bit" left in the art studio and kitchen. That little bit turned into number of boxes!
- Everything is a box. You start to get creative when you bought a number of shipping/storage containers but you don't really want to go out and purchase more. Empty suitcases? box. Hampers? box. Bags that held bedding materials when you purchased them? box. laundry basket? box. rolling cart? box. Cabinets you knew were deep, but didn't realize how deep they actually were? super box! Empty delivery boxes? Definitely reused for packing up the house.
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| Partway through packing up the kitchen/dining room, we had boxes and items everywhere! |
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| Packing our jackets/fancy clothes in a wardrobe box. Most of our clothes got packed into airtight bins to avoid any weird garage smells from seeping into the fabrics. This box got a bag of baking soda. |
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| We were able to fill our hall closet with books 4 rows deep! we definitely took advantage of all the space we had available inside the house that wouldn't be impacted by the work. |
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| our bookshelves are technically the hallway linen closet. We had a lot of space behind the books, so we pushed them all the way back and made room for our pantry goods. We didn't want to put any foodstuffs in the garage, since we did this when we first moved in and it attracted rodents.
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| hampers, suitcases, duffel bags all became boxes to pack away clothes and other household goods. |
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| Starting to move items into the garage. |
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| the table became half random-catchall, and half donation pile. |
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| the kitchen/dining looked worse before it looked better. |
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| wrapping the tech up to protect it and minimize dust. |
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| we pulled down all our wall art/photos in addition to packing everything up. Here, our accent wall has almost all the images removed. |
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| we had a jar full of bottle caps that we've been collecting just for fun over the years. While we never fully filled the jar up, we decided it was time to part ways and that the metal caps could be recycled into something better. |
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| hangars in the bathtub! (the duffel contains even more hangars) |
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| we added the doors back onto our hall cabinet/bookshelves and then taped off the edges to prevent/minimize any dust intrusion. |
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| This is when we fooled ourselves into thinking we were done and the house was packed. We had more boxes that were added after this point. I don't have a photo of the "after" when it was actually done. |
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| It's mostly empty, right?! |
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| art studio mostly packed, with the flat files moved to the garage AFTER the blue tarp was covering the the bulk of the boxes. |
