Lessons Learned (...and learning...)

My favorite box label. Only in our apartment.

We're deep into the unpacking process, and I've been learning a lot about long-distance moves. I' storing some notions for the move in two years. Things I experimented with, like:

1. Making a hole in the bottom of a garbage bag, threading hangers through the hole with clothes still on the hangers, and tying the bag up. I had too many clothes in my closet for one wardrobe box (even after all of the donations and swaps! How did that happen??) and this helped keep them organized.
2. Organizing my jewelry by wrapping my necklaces individually in tissue paper (okay, I used Kleenex) so they didn't get tangled, and bagging pairs of earrings in tiny ziplocks so nothing got lost.

And some things I learned from having guys load our stuff on a truck and drive for several days:

1. If using recycled boxes, make sure to label your boxes clearly! We used boxes from my mom's best friend's recent move, and even though we tried our best to scratch out her writing, and even labeled ours in a different color, the movers were still confused about which rooms to put the boxes in. ("Follow the black writing, not the green!") Plus, sometimes we just plumb forgot to label the boxes with our own directions, so we've been finding things in the wrong rooms sometimes.
2. The "miscellaneous" box is not only a necessity, it's expected. One of our movers told me, "If you don't have at least one miscellaneous box, you're not moving right." That said, we have a lot of miscellaneous boxes. And they're not easy to unpack.
3. The best box we had: our MISCELLANEOUS BOX OF DEATH. We had a huge box in the middle of The Kid's room that random big stuff went into. It was huge, it was messy, and it was awesome.
4. Movers expect you to not be fully packed when they get to your place. So, if you've made a pact to trash/donate/leave behind anything that hasn't made it into a box by the time the movers arrive, unless you tell them that at the get-go, they might thrown your random junk into a box and move it halfway across the country. We've found a few boxes of old mail and things we meant to throw away or donate. Oops!
5. Even with the best of intentions and super-nice and -efficient movers, things will be stressful and non-time-sensitive. It's tough to not know when your stuff is going to get to your new home, even though a couple-of-day delay gives you time to figure out where your furniture is going to go when it gets there. We thought we were going to get a two-day heads-up; what we got was a two-hour heads-up. While we were in a movie theatre seeing The Edge of Tomorrow. Because we thought there was no way our stuff was going to arrive that day.
6. It all worked out fine.