johnbernstravelblog

As logical as your system seems when you pack your stuff, the logic will probably escape you six or twelve months later when you are looking for one particular item out of all the stuff you have stored in all your boxes.

Coming home from a long trip isn’t the same as moving from apartment to apartment of from house to house.

When you move to a new apartment or house the process is usually pretty simple: find new place, pack, move, unpack, done.

When you come back from a long trip it’s a longer process of readjustment. When you come back you usually stay with family or friends for a while, spend some time readjusting to your “strange old surroundings,�? look for a job, then, after a few days or even weeks you will move into a new place—then you unpack.

Before you get around to moving and unpacking your boxes you might find need for some of your belongings.

Let’s say you just got back from six months in Africa. Africa was very hot, you wore lightweight pants and T-shirts all the time. Now you are home, it’s November and you are in Chicago. You want a big, warm wool sweater. That sweater could be in any one of the 12 boxes you see before you labeled “clothes.�? Or it could be in the two boxes that you can’t see, buried in the back, labeled “clothes.�?

The last thing you want to do is to tear open all the boxes looking for that &*$% sweater. (Especially when they are in a tiny storage locker, it’s November in Chicago, it’s cold and rainy out and you have to repack all the boxes afterwards because you still don’t have an apartment to move to.)

So, here’s how I pack.

For each box I make two labels (just a half sheep or regular paper, taped securely to the box with a piece of clear, wide packing tape a bit longer than the long edge of the label), one for each side of the box that lists, in fair detail, what’s in the box, the box number and where that box is being stored. (Putting the location of where you will store each box makes it easier if you store things in multiple locations, say, some stuff in a storage locker and some stuff in Mom’s basement, it makes it easier to keep track of where each thing goes on moving day.)

I also type the contents into an Excel spreadsheet (you could just as easily use a word processing program or a notepad) to make a manifest of the contents of each box, the box number and the location of where it’s stored so you can scan the list and see what you have in what box and where the box is. (You will be surprised at how easily you forget what you do and don’t own when you haven’t seen it for six months or a year or longer.)