- Hi there. It's Laura here from Get Organized HQ, and I'm coming to you from my garage. You can see these boxes behind me, because we are gonna
be moving really soon. So I thought I would go
ahead and share with you some of my top tips for a
smooth and organized move. Now, we have moved many times
within the past several years, and have learned a lot along the way. I will tell you the one thing
that made all the difference in our moves, in this
move and the last two, we used a moving binder, and
that is what just transformed everything for us. We had so many people say, "It
was the most organized move they've ever seen." And honestly, it went so well. And that was all because we were organized and used the moving binder. So I'm gonna be showing you
at the end of this video, how I put mine together,
what resources I used, or if you wanna get this for yourself, go ahead and check out
that link down below. Also, I've done a video
on this in the past, so if you wanna go check
out my past moving video, you can click the link below. These are brand new tips, though. So I won't be repeating
anything I did in that video. So if you wanna go check
that out at the end, you can. So let's go ahead and dive in. Besides the moving binder that
I'll talk about in the end, let's go ahead and dive in to the tips. (upbeat music) This is something that
I don't hear given a lot as a moving tip, but make
sure you take pictures, and or video of your current home before you start packing it up. Because for me, those
homes, they just hold so many memories. It's where I brought my
baby home from the hospital. It was our first home
after we got married. It's where my daughter
started kindergarten, or all these things, they
just hold so many memories. And I don't wanna start
packing up and then realize, "Oh, I don't have any
pictures of the spaces." So I go through with a camera, take a picture of all the spaces. I even take a picture of the closets. For this most recent move, I did a video that I will be
posting on the channel soon about my organized home
tour before we packed up. Do that just for your own memories sake. Now let's talk about boxes for your move. Now, of course, you can tell
your friends and family, "Hey, if you have any extra
boxes, send them our way." But another way to get moving
boxes without having to pay for them is to use the Next Door app or something like
Facebook and ask on there, "Hey, does anybody have any
boxes they're getting rid of?" Or sometimes you'll even
see posts on there of people that have just moved
and they need to get rid of their boxes. You're probably doing
them a favor if you go take them off of their hands anyway. So they don't have to figure
out what to do with them and you'll get some good boxes that way. Also, I am not opposed
to paying for boxes, even though I'm a fairly frugal person. I find to get us started, if we just spend $20, $30,
$40 at Home Depot on boxes, it can go a long way, because
those boxes are sturdy, they have handles, they're
all uniform inside, they stack nicely. So in some ways you really
do get what you pay for. So I'm not opposed to
spending a little bit at one of those home improvement
stores for moving boxes. Next, let's talk about hanging clothes. I think it's easiest if
you don't even remove those from the hanger, because
that's a lot of extra work to take them off the
hanger, put them in a box, and then have to hang them back up. Instead, I have put them in boxes, just kind of folded
over once on the hanger, especially for kids clothes
that are really small. Or, I have taken them and
put a trash bag over them just to keep them protected. But I like keeping them on
the hangers when you move. It just makes it so much easier when you're putting them away. When you're actually packing, make sure that you take like
heavy coats and blankets and don't just put those all in one box. Instead, use those as
fillers or cushioning, so that if you have something more fragile or something that you
don't wanna slide around. And there's always these
boxes with just a little bit of empty space, and
the fuller you fill the box the better, so there's less
moving around inside the box. So don't waste those blankets
in a box of their own. Instead, use them as filler, or if the box is getting too
heavy and you need something light, a blanket is the
perfect solution for that. A little logistical tip that I like to do is about a week before our move, I will transition us
to all paper products. And I will do either
like food that is takeout or like a casserole in a disposable pan. So I will make sure that we
have all throw away food, or I'll have the ingredients
for peanut butter and jelly sandwiches and
like a plastic knife. So that way we can pack up our
kitchen without needing it. So just plan for that, and
plan for those easy meals and stuff that you can just throw away. Next, I recommend doing
what we have done here in our garage. And as we pack boxes,
we move them to one spot in our garage, and we're just
building our stack of boxes as we go. And that helps us with a couple of things. First of all, once a box is
packed full and ready to go, we get it out of the
house, so we can easily see what we have and what boxes
still need to be packed. And number two, this makes it
so much easier on moving day. I cannot tell you how
much time this saves, because when the truck comes,
make this location as close to your door as you can. For us, I mean, the truck is
gonna park just right there. So nobody has to carry
those boxes very far at all, but it didn't take that
much extra work for us gradually over time to
bring them down to where they're gonna live until
they get on the truck. So I love that for a smoother move, especially on moving day. After moving many times in my life and helping lots of other people move, I can tell you one mistake
that everybody makes and I have done this myself. So don't feel bad if
you're guilty of this, is underestimating all
those odds and ends. You know, those little
stuff at the very end, like there's a few things
under the bathroom sink and a few things under the kitchen sink, and a few things left high
up here in this closet. Those things are really hard
to pack and time-consuming, because a lot of them
are not the type of thing that's easily thrown into a box. Maybe there's like cleaners
that can spill and things like that, so more thought has
to be put into packing them. And those are the things
that a lot of people leave to the very end. So you're trying to load
up your moving truck. Lots of things are going
on, and you're still dealing with those last minute odds and ends. So you cannot be too prepared with packing up the odds and ends. I like to make sure
that before I go to bed the night before the move,
all of that is like completely ready to go, and I'm simply
living out of a suitcase. There is nothing, like it's all empty. That's gonna make your life
so much smoother and easier. And I can just tell you from experience, those things are gonna take
two or three times as long as you imagine that they will. And I actually find that the
further you get into packing, the slower it goes. Like, the first boxes go really fast, because they're the
really, really easy things. And the longer you get into it, the more tricky items you're left with. So account for those
taking a little bit longer. Don't overestimate what you can get done. It is easy to be too ambitious,
or maybe it's just me, but I wanna use moving as
an opportunity to declutter. I mean, what point is
there in moving something that I am simply gonna declutter later? So I wanna get a lot done. I wanna streamline. This is a great goal and I
highly recommend doing that, but here's the mistake. As we get closer to move
time, lower the bar. There comes a time where you
just have to call it and say, "If I haven't gotten it
decluttered, I'm not. We need to shift our focus
from this and just get it all in the boxes." Do that sooner than you think you need to, and you will only thank yourself. Worst case, you happen to
finish the packing early, and you have a little
bit of time to relax, but the alternative is that
you're not actually prepared and that's a really awful feeling. So know when to call it
and say, "Now, or go." And usually for me, that is
like seven days ahead of time. Forget trying to streamline
anything, forget Goodwill, get it all in boxes so it
can go to the new house. As I mentioned, my secret
weapon to an organized move is my moving binder. I actually have here our
current moving binder is right here, and these are
our previous two moving binders from our last two moves. And these have been a game changer. And the last two moving
binders were amazing. But I have revamped this
moving printable kit even more and made it even better. So we just updated the look,
modernized it a little bit, and added some more additional
rooms and some additional pages that might be really helpful to you. So let me just walk you through
this, and wait until you see the auto magical way that it fills out. That is my favorite part about this kit. And just wait until you see it. But first let me kind of walk
you through it and what it is. So we personally put our
moving legend on the outside, just so it's really,
really easy for us to see our master key of where all the rooms are. Now, we are moving into
a really big house. It's kind of like an area for the business and a home combined. And so we have a ton of rooms. Most people won't. We've never used more than this page, but if you do, it's there for you. If you don't, just don't
use the second page, or you can subdivide by
like room versus closet, or something like that, if you
want it to be that in-depth. So that's what we have done. There's also a pretty binder
outside cover if you want to. And then we've organized
ours with a Box Index first. This is where we're going through, and we just write the box
number, where it's going, like the garage and what's
in it, like the air mattress. Now, this might feel silly. You might think, "Why am I
taking the time to write down the contents of the box?" Let me tell you, this is a lifesaver. For example, just the other
day my husband had been packing and he had packed up the
air mattress with the pump, but then my kids wanted
to swim in that pool where you need the air
mattress pump to blow it up. And I was able to go
to this index and see, "Oh, box 20 has our air
mattress and the pump." So it was very easy for me to get it out. Same when you arrive. So this is just a lifesaver. The earlier it is, the more I fill it out. The closer it gets to the move, the lazier I get, and that's just life. It's okay. So we have the Box Index. Print this page out as
many times as you want. You'll see here, in the past, we have a lot of boxes in our moves. I'll just thumb through this for you. And I don't worry about keeping it neat. It's just functional for me. So we had 109 boxes on
the most recent move. This one's gonna have probably even more. So we start with the index,
and then this is what I think is so cool. Then we punch our labels. I use Avery labels, and
I'm gonna talk about which exact ones in just a moment. That's what we use. We print these out, and
they're all ready to go in our binder. So as we're packing, we
just take one of these off and we place it on the box. And all we write right
here is the box number. So we would write like 1, 2,
whatever the box number is, and then we would write
that down on our index. So we follow the same order
that we did on our master key. And here we have just noted that tab one has all of these. Tab two has all these. That's how we organized it. You can do it however you want. So you'll see here, I have the kitchen. We can flip through these. Then we have my daughter's
room, the master bedroom, and then we come over
here and we have garage. Now we'll take this out once
we've used up the last one, and so on. So we flipped through several of those, just having these, like
this makes it so easy. You just need one binder,
and you're good to go. And you can pack anything. No matter who is packing, if
it's me, if it's my husband, if someone is helping us. Often, we've had somebody
come by and help a little bit, so easy for everyone to follow the system and have everything right there together in one place. Then, let me show you some
of the other components. So we've added some labels,
the "Open Me First," boxes. I talked about in my last
video that I will link to about the importance of these, but you can label those if
something's extra heavy. I like to label that just so
people kind of have a heads up, this is gonna be heavier than it looks. If something is really
fragile, you can label that. You can also label, "This End Up." So sometimes I'll put a bin without a lid, and I'll put "This End Up," on the box, just so everybody knows, "Go
ahead and put this end up." Now when you're using a label, it's usually clear which end is up, but if I want a little extra reassurance, I'll go ahead and add that label. "Do Not Stack" label for you. This is our year at a glance,
where you can write your old and new residence, just
have it right there for you so whenever you're changing
utilities and all of those things, it's super, super easy for you. Then this is my favorite. And this is new to this kit,
is our Master Checklist kit. And so we pre-populated
this for you with the things we think are really
important for you to do. And then you fill in the rest yourself. And as you go, you just
check off 6 weeks before, 5, 4, 3, 2, 1, the day before, moving day, and after the move, so it's
kind of your master list of everything to do. We also included a blank version for you, in case you wanna come
up with it all yourself and you don't like our pre ideas for you. I like a list of food to eat up. A lot of times people overlook that, but you want to know what
food it is that you need to eat up before you go. The "Stop and Start," super helpful. So old residence, electric, new residence, gas, water, sewage. If you don't have it, just cross it out, like our new house doesn't have gas. It's all electric. But that's super important for knowing, keeping track of the utilities
that you need to make sure you get stopped at your current residence and started at your new residence. So those are just a few. We have some others as well. And then we also have, these are room signs that
coordinate with the key. So if you want to tape up on the door, like in my video room, like,
no one's just gonna know what that is. That means like room
for me to film videos. I'll have like a dedicated studio. So we'll hang that on the
door to make it clear. Now, some things are
clear, like the kitchen. I hope people can figure
out what the kitchen is, but that is just gonna
make it extra clear. Now let me show you how
you actually do this. And this is so cool. So you'll get this Moving
Kit, when you buy it, it's an instant download. You'll get an email right
away with a download link, and you can just start using
it right then and there. There are some simple instructions. There are some of these
sheets that I have talked about here first. So print out which of those you need. If you don't need them, I
would say don't print them out. I like to kind of print out one by one. Print out several of the Box Index. I would recommend 'cause you'll need that. I like this "Open Me First,"
index so I know which boxes are those open me first boxes
that have like shower curtain, towels, important things. Now, this is where the true
magic of this kit comes in. So this Moving Legend here, you type it once and
it automatically fills everything else out,
according to your legend. So if we scroll down a little bit here, you're gonna see like,
these are the room signs, they're empty, as are the labels. Okay? But when I fill out this legend, they are going to
automatically fill out for me. So let's say, I want this
dark red to be the kitchen. I like to do it in all caps. You can do it ever how you want. This is an Arial font
that everyone should have on their computer. So there should be no fonts to install or anything like that. I'm gonna say, girls' bedroom, master bedroom, office, main bath, playroom, guest bath, guest room, garage. I always have the garage
on there and storage room. Okay. So I've typed these in simply once. And as I scroll down, now I'm
just gonna leave this blank as if you don't have that
many rooms that you want to, which many people won't, and you'll see how it's automatically filled
out these rooms signs for me. And then you'll see these
next ones are blank, because I didn't use
that part of the legend. I just don't put any, like,
I don't have that much I wanna move to. And then it has also filled
out these labels for me. That is the true beauty of this system. Type it once, and it's
magically done for you. Now, I know, you'll see
these blue boxes behind it. Those do not actually print. That is just saying that's
a fillable form on the kit, but they don't actually print. So you'll see, this is how it printed. It will not print those blue boxes. So that is all there is to it. It's really that simple. The one other thing I
wanna mention is how to put this binder together. Now, these are Avery labels
and it says right here on every page in case you
forget that it prints best on Avery 8163 labels. Those are two by four inches. Now, those are labels
that you could just get at any store, any office
supply store, on Amazon, very, very easily. But I want to point out one
thing about those labels, and tell you why I actually
use a different label. So if you use those Avery 8163 labels, they are not removable. So, like if you stick
them on a piece of paper, on a box, on a piece of
furniture, they may not come off. And heads up, that's not great
on some of your furniture. Now, luckily we don't have
any super fancy furniture. It'll come off with Goo Gone,
hasn't been a huge issue, but you do wanna label that furniture, because it's very, very
important that that gets to the right room. Like, if a box goes to the wrong room, you can move it yourself. But for us on moving
day, there's some stuff that's too heavy for us to move. So we wanna make sure,
like we get the bookshelf in the office, and not in living room, those kinds of things, where we want it. So I wanna be able to
put it on the furniture without worrying, and also
it's nice to be able to take it off of even like
plastic totes or boxes. So Avery actually allows
you from their website to order any of their sizes
in any of their styles. And they have a style here. You'll see, this is
what I actually ordered on removable matte white paper. And I'll leave a link to
this below, to both of them. So this will take about
a week or two to arrive. So it takes slightly longer
than if you just went to your local store and bought it. And you can buy in lots of quantities. Heads up, if you buy in a larger quantity, it brings the price down significantly. So make sure you check that out, and make sure you're
getting the best quantity and the best price. And then it will cost a little bit more to get these removed. So if you wanted to save,
you might do some of each. You can't really see. They're just a sheet of labels. They're the exact same size as the 8163, but they are removable and won't really damage your furniture. So this is what I printed
my last binder on. Now, one other note on assembling, we have assembled in
various different ways. Most recently for this
move, we're just using a three ring binder. So we simply literally punched
the labels and all the pages in a three ring binder. Nothing's gonna fall out. It's very easy to use. What I will say though, if you do this, and I highly recommend that
you punch them into a binder, three of the labels are gonna be like, there's gonna be a hole in them. So we just kind of ripped them like that, and it doesn't bother us. It could bother you, so I just wanna note, that's what we do. One other thing that I wanna note, so for our previous moves,
we've used the discbound system. I'm a huge fan of discbound. I think these are art
supplies from Staples. So what the discbound
system does is it means that you're not punching
very far into the paper. So that's super nice. This was our old style of moving binder. So you're barely punching
into the actual labels themselves at all. The trade-off is if you are
really carrying this around a lot, or you're holding it like this, and you're kind of jerking it, they can pop off a little bit. So for the moving binder,
we went for the security of the three rings, even
though it's gonna mean a couple of our labels will just have
like a little hole in them. You could use page protectors. We thought that would be just
harder to get the labels out. Like, you'd have to pull the
sheet out and put it back in. We thought that this was easier. So we're very happy with that choice. One other note, on my last video, we got several comments about tips for actually packing the boxes. Like, literally, how
do you pack the boxes? Well, let me give you my tip. There is no magic way. We have tried all different things. I gave you the advice of
using blankets as fillers. I would also say fuller is better, just so things don't shift around. But it is pretty tricky
because as we're going, it's just, you're not
gonna have things that fit the boxes perfectly. So you're gonna have to have
some with some extra room, you're gonna end up with some
that are a little heavier than you wanted. I just haven't found like
the magic way to pack boxes, that means that they're packed perfectly. So I just wanna let you know
that if you feel the same way, you're not alone. There's no real magic. Just get it done, however
you can is my best advice. I hope this video has
helped give you some tips for a smooth and organized move. And be sure to click the link below, to check out the moving
binder that I talked about and get it for herself. And I would love to hear from you. If you use these tips in your next move, let me know how it goes for you. (upbeat music)
