Let’s face it, packing up an apartment’s worth of furniture, furnishings, and stuff and hauling it across the country is not really easy on the earth by any stretch of the imagination. But between all the packing materials and that big truck there are a few ways we’re trying to make our move a little less resource consuming.
1. Reduce!
We have a couple weeks to pack up, so we have plenty of time to go through our stuff and donate, sell, recycle, or toss anything that we don’t need anymore. It means less boxes to move and more space for us at our next place, which happens to be a little bit smaller than our current apartment.
2. Packing in storage bins, luggage, drawers, etc
We’ve had four of those big plastic storage bins hiding in our apartment for the past 3 years. They each held a few things, but none of them were full. In fact, one of them was where we kept our empty duffle bags. So those came out, got filled with clothing, and the bin got filled with dishes. We’re also using the drawers of our armoir to pack books in. The drawers are sturdy, and just the right size so that they won’t be too heavy when packed with books.
3. Reusing boxes
As far as I can tell there is no reason for anyone to purchase boxes specifically for their move. Between the car seat and stroller boxes, a couple recent amazon purchases, friends, and grocery stores or liquor stores, we have been able to collect enough boxes for all our remaining packing.
4. Using cloth to pack our fragile items
We have plenty of light blankets, tablecloths, cloth napkins, towels, and socks that make the perfect packing materials for surrounding our dishes and other breakables. This saves us from having to use paper or plastic packaging materials that we would end up needing to dispose of after we unpacked.
5. Reserving a truck that’s just the right size
For this move we’ll happen to be caravan-ing with a couple cars as well, so we took that into account when picking out the truck we will be renting for the move. Uhaul gives recommendations based on the size of the place you are moving out of. We used that as a base, and then considered the extra trunk space we would also have to pack in and evaluated if we could safely downsize.