How to pack if you are moving in two stages

The keys to the new place arrive on the tenth, the old ones go back on the thirtieth. Or the floor is not laid yet. Or the person you live with moves a month after you. In all three cases the move is not one day: it is two, with three weeks in between when you live half in one place and half in the other.

The trouble is not carrying things twice. It is that for three weeks you need things you have already packed, and you cannot remember where. People who move in a single day open everything that same evening and that is the end of it. People who move in two stages are deciding, without noticing, what they will not be able to use until the second trip.

The dividing line is not between important and trivial

The split that comes to mind first does not hold: the important things with me, the rest later. It does not hold because almost everything you use every day is unimportant. The colander is not important. The charger is not important. The screwdriver you put the shelf up with is not important.

The real line comes down to a single question: between now and the second trip, will I open it? Whatever answers no goes first. Whatever answers yes, and whatever answers maybe, stays out.

So this is what goes first: the out-of-season clothes, the dinner service for twelve when there are two of you in those weeks, the pictures, the ornaments, the skis, the books. They are also the heavy things and the ones that take up the most space, and the overlap is useful: the first trip is the one you make calmly, and calm is worth most where the load is awkward. Books are the extreme case, and they are best tackled when you have weeks ahead of you rather than hours.

What goes in no box at all

There is a third category, and it is the one that makes the weeks in between liveable: the things you do not pack at all.

There are few of them and you know them already. Two changes of clothes, what you need in the bathroom, your medicines, the computer, the documents, two pans, a couple of towels, the bare minimum of tools for putting things together. In a straightforward move they fit in a bag for one night, and you will find them in the week by week checklist. Here they have to last for weeks, so you put them together like luggage for a long trip, not like an emergency kit.

Set them aside before you start packing, not after. If you go looking for them at the end, you will be looking inside six boxes that are already shut.

Knowing where something is without opening six boxes

The second problem turns up towards the end of the first week, when you go looking for something you were sure you had kept out.

A list is enough, and nothing more. Number the boxes, or tie a tag to them, and keep a note on your phone with the number and three lines of contents. No more than that: a detailed inventory is one you never finish, and a half finished one is worse than no inventory at all, because you trust it.

What really changes, compared with a move done in a day, is how many times you reopen. In a single day a box is shut once and opened once. Over two stages you may reopen three of them to pull out one item and then shut them all again. With cardboard every change of mind costs two extra steps: you cut the tape and then tape it up again. On a Cangubox there is no tape to cut. The lid is two hinged halves that clip together: you lift them to open and press them down to close, and nothing is left to buy, nothing to redo.

The weeks in between

Between the first trip and the second the boxes sit somewhere, and there are two homes each half full: in the old one the boxes still to go, in the new one the boxes that have arrived and not been opened.

In the new place pick one corner and stack them, instead of putting them down wherever there is room. Rigid boxes with a flat lid sit one on top of the other without the play you get with cardboard: the heaviest at the bottom of the stack, and columns no taller than you can control on your own. And an empty Cangubox does not sit around taking up space: with the two halves lifted, one slides inside the next, so ten open boxes take up the room of a few until collection day.

On the length of the rental one criterion applies: you measure it on the second trip, not the first. Book against the first date and you end up asking for an extension halfway through. You choose the period at the time of booking and you find it in the price list: doubling the time does not double the price, so the longer option costs less than two separate rentals. The two trips are chosen separately as well, so the boxes can arrive at one address and leave from the other, if both are among the areas we serve.

The trap in this kind of move is all at the start. You begin packing what is in front of your eyes, and what is in front of your eyes is almost always what you need tomorrow. Start at the back of the wardrobe and on the highest shelf, and leave until last the drawers you open every day. By the time you reach those it is already the second trip, and at that point the house empties in an afternoon.