What to do with the things you are not taking with you

You open the first wardrobe meaning to fill a box and you stop after ten minutes. Not because folding jumpers is hard, but because the third jumper is the one you have not worn for four winters, and now you are deciding whether to keep it instead of packing. Then it happens again with the shoes, with the cables in the kitchen drawer, with the books you have already read. By the end of the day you have put very little away and you are tired anyway.

The slow part of a move is not the effort, it is the decision. And the worst moment to make it is with an open box in front of you and a van booked for Saturday.

A move is the deadline you never had

The things you no longer want to carry did not appear the day you signed the new contract. They have been there for years, and until now nobody has asked you to look at them: in a home you live in there is always a third option, which is to leave everything where it is.

A move takes that third option away. Every object has to end up in a box or stay behind, and that turns the move into the moment the decision gets made whether you like it or not. It is uncomfortable, and it is also the one good thing about it: sorting now is not extra work added to the move. It is the same work removed four times over. An object you decide about today is one you do not pack, do not load, do not unload and do not find a place for in the new home.

It is worth writing down as an order of magnitude: the time you spend sorting comes back multiplied, and the time you do not spend sorting turns up all at once, in a room full of boxes nobody feels like opening.

Decide how to decide, before you decide

People who get stuck are not being lazy. They get stuck because they treat every object as a new case, so they rebuild the same reasoning eighty times in an afternoon. A rule decided once covers everything you open afterwards.

Four questions, always the same ones, always in this order:

• How long since I used it? A whole season skipped is a fact, not an impression. The coat you did not wear last winter, the racket untouched for two summers, the pan at the back of the cupboard because you never reach that far.
• If it vanished tonight, would I buy it again? This is the question that unlocks the hard cases, because it moves you from "I would hate to throw it out" to "how much do I need it". Plenty of things you would never throw away you would not buy again either.
• Does it have somewhere to go in the new home? Measure, do not remember. If the new place has fewer wardrobes or fewer square metres than the old one, sorting stops being a virtue and becomes arithmetic.
• Am I keeping the object or the memory? If it is the memory, a photograph often does the same job and takes up nothing. That goes for children's drawings, for tickets, for the T-shirt from a concert twenty years ago.

Then there is the "maybe" pile, and it is worth naming straight away, because that is the one that survives moves. Maybe is not an answer: it is the same question postponed in tidier clothes. The only way to stop it growing is to give it a date, and we get to that shortly.

Every destination needs its own notice

Once you have decided something is not coming with you, it is not over: it has to go somewhere, and each route takes its own time. This is the part that wrecks the last few weeks, because it looks instant and it is not.

• Selling. Photos, listing, messages, appointments, people who do not turn up. That is weeks, not days. Set a stop date: anything unsold by that day changes destination and does not wait for the right buyer.
• Passing it on to someone you know. It closes sooner than a sale, but it depends on when that person can come and get it. Ask for a date, not for general availability.
• Donating. Check first what the receiver accepts, in what condition and at what times. Some charities collect from your door and have weeks of waiting list, others take only certain categories. One phone call first saves the trip with a full car and a closed door.
• Bulky waste collection (ritiro ingombranti). A sofa or a mattress does not go in a street bin. Your local council website tells you whether the service exists, how to book it and how much notice it wants: look now, because the notice period is the part that always catches people out.
• The local recycling centre (isola ecologica). Opening times, what it accepts from private residents, whether you need a document or a card. These things change from council to council and change over the summer, so the council page is worth more than what you remember from last time.

A note about heavy things, because this is where doing it yourself ends sooner than people expect. A sofa has to be carried down, and if you live on the fourth floor with no lift, or the stairs turn in a tight spiral, or your back has given you trouble before, that is the call to a removal company or to a house clearance firm. It is not giving up: it is the same logic by which a piano is moved by people who move pianos.

Then take the date of the move and count backwards, giving each destination its own week. If you do not have a calendar yet, a checklist with the weeks laid out is the place to slot these lines into.

What the way you pack changes

Up to here the sorting is yours and has to be done anyway. The way you pack decides one thing only, and that is how long you can postpone the "maybe" pile.

With cardboard you can avoid deciding. You close the box, you write "to sort" on it, you carry it into the new cellar and there it stays. It has no return date and nobody comes to ask for it back, and that is exactly why certain cardboard boxes survive two moves in a row. The rest should be said too, because it is a real advantage: you buy cardboard in the size you need, tall for the lamp and shallow for the books, and once bought it is yours.

Cangubox do have a return date, because they are rented: you choose the length when you book, and at the end we come and collect them. The "maybe" has to have found a destination by that day. The rental can be extended, but only up to a ceiling, beyond which it is no longer a move but storage, and storage is not something we do. Put bluntly: if what you want is somewhere to park the undecided for two years, cardboard in a cellar does that job and a rented box does not. If instead the deadline is the very thing you need to close the matter, then it works in your favour.

There is also the count of operations, and this is where sorting done early shows up in full. A cardboard box bought for things you then throw out is a box bought, assembled, taped, filled, carried by hand, emptied and disposed of: seven steps for contents that never wanted to reach the new home. Sort before you order and you simply order fewer boxes. How many you need is counted on the enclosed spaces still full after the sorting, not on the ones full today, and the kit is chosen on the home page. If you overestimate, the Cangubox you do not use go back with the others, with no extra work for you.

One last difference, and it matters exactly while you are emptying wardrobes: a Cangubox comes in one size only, 60 × 40 × 36 cm on the outside for 68 litres, and it holds up to 30 kg. Cardboard you choose in the shape you want. For an object longer than sixty centimetres, or one heavier than thirty kilos, you need something else in both cases, but at least cardboard comes in the right shape.

The rest of the conditions is short and worth knowing in advance: we cover Milan, the covered postcodes of its hinterland and the province of Monza and Brianza, and both addresses have to be covered, the one we deliver to and the one we collect from. We need three working days' notice, which is the time it takes to prepare the boxes and fit the round in. And we do not do the move itself: we bring the boxes and take them away, the carrying stays with you or with a removal company.

Start with the room you care about least

Almost everyone's first mistake is opening the box of photographs. It is the wrong room to start from: every object there is a story, you go on for three hours and decide nothing.

Start instead with the storage cupboard, the cellar, the bathroom cabinet, the drawer full of cables. Those are places where the questions have quick answers and where the largest volume in the house sits. An hour in the storage cupboard clears more than an afternoon of albums.

Then three practical rules, and they are short on purpose:

• One hour, one enclosed space. A shelf, a drawer, a cupboard door. When that is done, the session is over. Short sessions get repeated, marathons do not.
• Every destination gets its own date in the calendar. The sold, the donated, the bulky waste, the recycling centre. A destination without a date is a pile in the hallway.
• The "maybe" expires. Pick a day, write it down, and on that day everything still in the maybe pile gets decided standing up, without being put back. It will be a worse decision than the one you would have made calmly, and it will still be better than the one you never make.

When you reach moving day with the sorting already done, packing becomes what you wanted it to be all along: a dull, predictable job where you open a cupboard and put in what is there, because the hard part was closed weeks earlier.