Salon post: December 28

[jenett]

Hello!

First, a (rather literal) housekeeping note: there will not be a salon post next Friday (January 4th), because I am moving apartments, and I will be doing all the things that need to happen last minute before the movers arrive in the morning. (And may in fact move my computer the night before...)

If all goes well on the moving front, I will try and get one up Friday evening or Saturday morning, but I may just skip a week.

Topic of the week
What's your preferred approach to a big project like moving. Lists? Categories of things you do? Breaking it down into small pieces? Running around with chaos?

What I've been up to
Packing things! I've also been in at work for three days (well, it'll be three days by the end of the day) this week, when basically no one else is, and I love this week because it's quiet, I get a lot done, and I get to go into the new calendar year feeling fairly caught up.

(I was out on vacation last week, and I cleaned my desk off before I left, so things even look organised. I am usually a 'organise by pile' person who tries to keep things looking neat with varying degrees of success.)


Useful notes
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Comments

[rmc28]

My favourite approach is LISTS. Sometimes categorised lists. There is something about ticky boxes / lists that make me very happy.

I ran a smallish project at work off a set of task lists in Confluence a couple of months ago. (Coordinating three different upgrades to happen in the same downtime, work being done by 3-4 different people, plus a lot of communication to users.) It got the job done and was much lighter-weight than trying to fire up anything to make a Gantt chart or similar.

(At work we use Confluence a lot; it has some neat built-in functionality around tick-boxes and tagging individuals and dates - if you make a list of tickyboxed tasks and tag the person, they get a notification. If you put a date next to a ticky, it turns amber a week before the date (if not yet ticked) and turns red when the date has passed.)

[jenett]

I like lists very much. I am finding this move is involving multiple rounds of lists - I'm having to do one to get it out of my head, and then transfer into the actual todo app.

Confluence sounds very handy for certain kinds of projects!

[finch]

I've been using Trello to do simpler-but-similar lists, where I can assign stuff to my spouse and give things dates and get reminders. I can see where more powerful versions of those features would be super helpful in a work environment.

[cjsmith]

I adore lists too. Like finch above, I use Trello, but Confluence sounds very intriguing!

[tomakeanoffer]

When we moved from Florida to Tennessee, I think we used a lot of lists, a lot of breaking things down, and a lot of forgetting to do all the things and then doing all the things a few days before actually leaving.

I do not recommend the last part of this.

[jenett]

I have done the frantic thing before, and I also do not recommend it.

(I'm currently stuck in the 'what do I move when' place, because it's a short-distance move, and I, y'know, need to eat and sleep on things the night before I move.)

[jazzyjj]

I was kinda like that when I moved from a downstairs apartment up to this one. We had to move my bed up here, plus some stuff from the bathroom in that apartment. As it turns out that bathroom is being remodeled. The current landlords had a new toilet and sink put in there. A bathtub shower is going in there too, which is the opposite of what happened up here. The stand-alone shower that was in the downstairs apartment got removed because the door started not closing properly. The bathtub shower up here never had drywall as I found out not long ago, and kept leaking to the point that the tiles started falling off. Luckily I was not harmed by them, and I now have a nice stand-alone shower.

[silveradept]

Usually, my way of handling moves is "one room at a time," where everything gets packed up that can from that room, and everything that isn't packed gets moved to the space that will be the staging ground, so that physically there's one less room to have to worry about. It helps when you have friends, too, so they can help you clear rooms efficiently.

Given that my last move was on a very short schedule, the friends were invaluable because they helped me plan it out and execute it while I was having a meltdown of executive function, based on the circumstances. I do not recommend doing it that way, but sometimes it's the only option you have.

For other things, my brain likes to wait until a task can get completely done in one shot (or as close as it can for that) so that it can do the me thing and not have to juggle remembering. I'm slowly figuring out the use of reminders, calendars, and smart devices to keep me on task for things that I have to do regularly, but that don't pop up regularly enough for them to stay in working memory. It's an adjustment to having a life that was small and simple enough to keep in working memory, but complexity expands to fit the available space.

[finch]

Oooh, I definitely see the appeal of one-room-at-a-time and then you can just... stop thinking about that room. I need to tuck that away for the next time we move.

[jenett]

I've been doing as much of that as I can, but there's the complication of not wanting to pack the ritual stuff too soon, and needing to be able to get at the AC, and so on. And I'm basically out of space to stack stuff in the living room in a meaningful way.

(Current layout, so lousy.)

[finch]

Oh yeah I can see how that would feel a little like going in circles even if you're doing all you can.

[finch]

I do a lot of make a list to get it out of my head, obsess about it anyway, make another list, repeat. Which is not optimal, but better than the alternatives. If I can reach a point where I really cannot do anything else until $THING, I set a reminder for $THING and then do my best to completely forget the thole mess exists until then.

[ilyena_sylph]

I... don't move.

Like, I took enough stuff to get by to college, and I have like 0 memory of how that went, but I was 18, so who's surprised? And then we bought the house here in 2003, and here I am still.

[finch]

I like this plan. It is a brilliant plan.

[ilyena_sylph]

+laughs+ It's something, anyway.

My pathological terror of uprooted-ness is... probably sigh-worthy. And senmut, my partner, just laughs at me. As is probably obvious from their comment below.

[jenett]

That seems a very pleasant sort of plan.

(I am up to.. um.

Back and forth in college, we won't count that.
Home to first apartment (3 months after I graduated, when my job started). There one year.
First apartment to Minnesota: August 1999 to February 2006
Minnesota apartment to first rented house: February 2006 to September 2006
First rented house to second rented house: September 2005 to August 2007
Last apartment in Minnesota: August 2007 to July 2010
First apartment in Maine: August 2010 to August 2011
Second apartment in Maine: July 2011 to May 2015
Current apartment: May 2015 through January 2019

For reasons that are probably obvious, I only acquired furniture that actually requires movers on the move to the current place.

(I ditched the bed in Minnesota in Minnesota, and moved with what would fit in a regular car with the back seats down that included a seat for the cat and the folk harp plus mailing all the books I was keeping. There is a reason I have gone over to ebooks for anything I don't want to actually hand to people. Mind, I'm still moving 18 boxes of books this time.)

(Also, I highly recommend sine_nomine as a co-driver and general point of sense and sanity in that process, who did a 3 day drive with me and the cat since it was August and neither the cat nor the harp could be left for any length of time in the car without the AC running.)

[senmut]

Oh that is stress....

[jenett]

Rather, yeah. Hoping this will be the last move for a while, because honestly.

[finch]

Yeah, I've (among many many other moves) chucked everything I couldn't fit in a hatchback on one move, and everything I couldn't fit in my airline luggage on another. Actually buying Real Grownup Furniture was a scary commitment! Not just to movers, though there was that, but to getting over the leftover-fear from various unstable living situations in the past that no longer look like my life at all.

[swingandswirl]

/giggles and pets you/

[senmut]

...

I have moved so many times that I can't even begin to tell you what the method of it is? I kind of go on remote pilot, and voila, wind up where I will next be living at.

Not helpful.

The one trick I can pass on is not to sort at the house being left? I will have a crisis if I decide to throw things out at the Departure House, but can then carefully toss things at Arrival House during the unpacking phase.

(Addendum, the above trick only works if I am not space constrained on moving things. I have, twice now, moved with ONLY what would fit inside one car, and was utterly ruthless both times)

[jenett]

I am, on this move, attempting to do a fair bit of sorting on the departure end, because the trash and recycling are much easier there. But it's definitely a bit more stressful.

(This is why I'm glad I've been able to do the sorting stretched over a couple of weeks, and I'm down to the parts I can just be ruthless about.)

[senmut]

I get that too! And... I am praying that ilyena_sylph's rootedness is truly sticking to me. I have days where I just look at the Stuff I have accumulated and feel a need to give away/throw away 90% of it to make moving easier. Despite being settled for the first time in my life for more than a few years in one place.

(I am 43. I have had, as best I can recall, over 25 addresses in my life)

[ilyena_sylph]

I have days where I just look at the Stuff I have accumulated and feel a need to give away/throw away 90% of it to make moving easier.

At which point I either verbally or physically sit on you until you stop wanting to do the thing.

+snuggles you+

[senmut]

Yes, dear.

[finch]

I am jealous of your ability to declutter on the Arrival House end. I have to make myself do it on the Departure House side or I just put whole boxes into closets and ignore them for a year or two.

[senmut]

I will still wind up with Storage Boxes of Forever Hiding. (One memorable occasion, they became the temporary kitchen table after precise layering and a table cloth...)

But those will be the odds and ends that have no true Space in the Arrival House, but are too sentimental/needed to be rid of (at least at that move).

[finch]

That's pretty brilliant, honestly. Maybe I should have just done that behind the couch and called it a sofa table. XD This is timely for me to think about as I'm going to gut the bedroom black holecloset this weekend and I know for a fact there's at least a handful of boxes in there I haven't touched since my now-four-year-old was born except to move them.

[senmut]

Hey, that sounds like a great place to build a box table!

[jjhunter]

Storage Boxes of Forever Hiding

...I just realized I have a computer desktop folder of exactly this called 'Temp Desktop Unsorted'. (It's older than my current laptop.)

[brooksmoses]

The "don't sort while in the stress of packing" advice definitely seemed to be what I needed in the last move we had.

For that one, I did a lot of what Jenett did in packing up books and things into boxes somewhat leisurely even before we knew where we were moving. Some of this was practical, but a lot of it was also a way of dealing with stress of the "there is too much cluttered stuff for this space" and "these books are making me sad right now." (The latter being architecture and interior decorating books, which were interacting badly with wanting a space that felt long-term and not having one.) That packing also included a reasonable bit of sorting and culling.

Then, when we actually found a place and actually had a move-in date, it became a matter of just getting it done -- and there most of the sorting was into categories of "we will need this soon at the new place" and "this can be unpacked at leisure". That took place over a span of a week or two, and since it was a move over about a mile, mostly we moved things in the back of the SUV -- I honestly don't remember if we even rented a trailer, though I suppose we must have for the mattress and a few other large things.

And then in the last day or so after almost everything was moved, there was a fair bit of going through the remaining few piles of miscellaneous detritus and pulling out the things that we did want to keep that hadn't made it into boxes. It turns out that 8 years in a cluttered apartment leads to rather a lot of miscellaneous detritus.

But, yeah, dealing with one stressor at a time was definitely the way to go there, and it was much easier to do the bulk of the sorting at the unpacking stage.

[senmut]

Sounds very organized!

[pameladean]

We last moved in 1996. The overall move combined what had been three separate households, but it happened in stages. David's and my portion of it was well organized in some regards and quite chaotic in others. We were fortunate that the person buying our house was a friend and didn't want the house for another month. We apparently failed to inform all of our helpers of this fact, or some of them didn't pay attention, because while we were quite calm at that juncture, they got increasingly wild and stressed as midnight approached, didn't follow instructions, and did panicky things to try to get the house completely cleared, which resulted in things we didn't want at all being moved and things we needed being left behind. Fortunately none of the latter were large.

Our failure to communicate also resulted in the misplacement of one kitchen chair, which surfaced innocently after we'd given away the table and the other three chairs months later -- and in the box containing paperback fiction Aa-Al being put in the back of a dining-room built-in on the wrong floor. We knew it was missing and left space at the beginning of the bookcase run, but we didn't find it for weeks, when we finally unpacked the last of the fragile glass stuff that didn't see daily use.

I should stop now or I will write a whole essay. We had numbered the rooms of each floor of the new house, appending A for the first floor and B for the second, and made stickers with floor plans, also containing the rooms' designations, and put a sticker on every box and every piece of furniture. We put up signs in each room with the room number and letter. Where people paid attention, things got where they needed to be.

The main chaos came in the month after the move. I think I will draw a veil over that.

Next time, if there is one, which I hope there won't be, I'll ruthlessly and repeatedly inform helpers that we don't need to be out by midnight.

Of course, we probably will need to be and something else weird will happen.

P.

[jjhunter]

Oh dear. You are also a person who I feel would appreciate Alternatives To 'The Things They Carried':

The Things They Tried To Carry.

The Things They Did Not Carry Carefully Enough.

The Things They Made Someone Else Carry.

[...]

[pameladean]

*gigglesnort* We were fortunate not to require the second category above. Nobody broke anything at all; which is pretty remarkable, really.

P.

[pameladean]

I meant to wish you all good moving luck and a very smooth transition. I hope you and the cat will both enjoy your improved space.

P.

[cadenzamuse]

Oh man, I am bad at moving. I make lists, I try to do stuff early, but largely I'm always running around like a crazy person at the last minute. Ideally I would start a couple months early and do a box a day, but I think chunks of rooms is probably more practical for the way my brain works.

[rosefox]

Lisssssssts. Bulleted lists. For multi-person projects, Airtable or a shared document of some kind.

Also, for house moves specifically:

1) Acquire or create floor plan of new home. Acquire or take measurements of furniture.
2) Input data into floorplanner.com. (They already have the measurements of all IKEA furniture items, so no need to measure those yourself.)
3) Figure out which items will go where. Label furniture and boxes with destination rooms.
4) On moving day, place each item of furniture in its final location as it arrives in the house, while you still have strong people there to move things around.

This absolutely saved us for our last move, and we've used the digital floor plan to plan subsequent rounds of furniture rearrangement, including the one we're in the middle of right now as we turn Kit's room from a nursery into a little kid's room.

[hrafn]

Lists. Multiple lists. The big overview list. Smaller lists breaking down the big items into precise steps/info. A big list in Evernote and smaller more detailed lists on paper next to the laptop so they are always right in front of me.

For my last move, I knew almost a year out that I would be leaving Portland sometime in the next 3-12 months, so I had LOTS of time to think things through in ways more clever than before, and do a lot of purging of unwanted/unneeded stuff.

Given all the time I had to think it through, I also had some "clever moving idea" lists on the fridge, for things that occurred to me months ahead of time (like: "use tarp and rope to wrap up futon mattress" so I wouldn't carefully pack that stuff up in a nice box). I am most pleased with those lists! I got some things packed up much nicer than in past moves.

Moving or not, I like lists, or other forms of "writing down all the details." At work I like to have a manual for my job where I keep track of how to do all my duties. Learned that from my first real position when I was on active duty, where there was supposed to /always/ be a "continuity" manual for each position.