Moving makes the clutter grow deeper

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Moving makes the clutter grow deeper

(18 posts) (14 voices)

Started 1 year ago by MichiganMess
Latest reply from chacha1
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MichiganMess
Member

Help!

Send in the experts -- I am drowning in STUFF.

My problem is compounded by the fact that I am moving out of my parents' house, into an apartment with two friends. My bedroom is going to shrink by 50%. I've condensed my 10 bookshelves of books (all full, some double stuffed) and chosen only books that will fit on one shelf (the largest I own, sure, but it's still only 1/10 of what I have, so that's progress, right?), and I've sorted through most of my paper supplies (half-empty notebooks, piles of post it notes and buckets of pens and pencils), saved some and sent the rest off to my high-school aged brother.

None of this has helped in the packing at all.

I don't want to start out in the new apartment like I'm living here.

So give me your tips, your tricks, your huddled wisdom yearning to help me.

I have:

My cloting, my bed, dressers and a nightstand, a toybox (full of sewing/crafting supplies) and three towers o' drawers full of crafting stuff. And bookshelves. Oh boy do I have those.

I'm looking for:

Creative ways to organize this stuff, ways you've found to get rid of what you really don't need and ideas on how to move in an organized manner.

Did I mention I'm moving in a week?

Posted 1 year ago #
nws2002
Member

Moving can be both an easy and a difficult time to purge. It's easy because you are already touching everything and packing it up, why not sort through it now and decide what you really want/need/have the space for. It's hard because towards the end you just want the process to be over and done with. At least that's how I feel when I move.

I have the hardest time giving up books. Mass market sized paperbacks fit neatly in underbed storage bins. Beyond that I don't have any great ideas. I've limited myself to 3 bookshelves in my apartment, and even those are crammed full right now. I give away books on Booksins, sell some on Amazon, and do the Bookcrossing thing with others.

It's not the perfect solution, but would it be possible to leave a portion of your stuff at your parents? It would give you a place to sort through stuff and slowing bring it into the new space as organized and purged as it can be.

I hesitate to suggest self-storage, but it would also be an option. Only if you are sure you will go through the items at a later date.

Posted 1 year ago #
Irulan
Member

I second nws2002's idea of sorting it at your parents. Do you need to completely empty out the space by the time you move, or can you leave extra stuff in there to sort through for a specific amount of time, like 2 weeks?

If you can use your old room for a bit longer, then what I would suggest is to move in rounds. First, bring only what you know you absolutely need: bed; 1 dresser; 1 shelf; important papers; favorite in-season clothes; basic toiletries; items needed for work or school. Get rid of items that you've already decided that you don't need, then move in stuff that you forgot you needed to bring in the first round. After that, you can critically assess what remains in your parents' house.

Also, can you share a shelf or two with your roommates in the common areas? Bookshelves are really good for holding extra dishes and such.

Posted 1 year ago #
klutzgrrl
Member

I googled 'towers o drawers' to see what your craft storage is like... no success but I can guess. Can you condense that stuff? Do you really need it all? You've probably outgrown a fair bit of it! Be ruthless and only keep things that you really love, will really use or are hard or expensive to replace.

Clothing. If you're anything like my teenage daughter you have WAY TOO MUCH! Can you reduce that a bit?

What sort of storage does your new room have? In Australia, most modern houses have built-in wardrobes while very old houses might need a free-standing wardrobe for clothes.

'dressers' PLURAL sounds like one too many.

Books can go in a shared area, I would have thought, at least apart from any special ones. Ditto at being useful - I remember as a student we never had enough furniture.

Does your bed have space for underbed storage?

Posted 1 year ago #
Periwinkle
Member

For books, investigate your local library. If you have any really common books (Jodi Picoult et al) that they always have on the shelves, you can probably ditch your copies - any time you want to read them, you can get them from the library.

You could also look at bookmooch.com (book swapping site). If you have, for example, lots of John Grisham novels, get rid of them - some of them have about 90 copies available on bookmooch so you can always get one if you want one again.

Can you live without a nightstand? I don't have room for one so I have a large box file (looks like a magazine file, except it's covered, and it's just less than 15cm wide) which is much smaller. I can put things on top (some coasters, a bottle of water, my phone which is my alarm clock, and some vaseline) and also put things inside (hair scrunchies to wear at night, books I'm reading). It's much smaller than a regular nightstand but does just the job.

Will you be able to put shelves up in the new place? You could put up some near the ceiling as that space won't be used most likely. Or make sure that your bookshelves are as tall as will fit in the space so you're using the vertical space as well as possible.

Posted 1 year ago #
trillie
Member

Hi and welcome MichiganMess, and also: DON'T PANIC :o)

I think the suggestion that you take only the essentials and leave other stuff at your parents' house to deal with later is great (but don't forget about it and make appointments with yourself to look through it and get rid of it). It will be so much easier for you. Also, you have accumulated your stuff and your books over years, so it's really not easy or possible to make sensible decisions within a week :o)

And if it's not possible to leave non-essential stuff at your parents' (or if the distance between old home and new home is too big), there is nothing wrong with living with a tower of boxes for a few weeks! It's okay to give yourself some time for this and unpack them slowly one after another.

For tips on moving, there are a couple of links that might be helpful for you here:
* help!!, a thread on how to declutter before a move; there are a few interesting links in there too
* Moving 101: Top 10 Lessons Learned & Tips that Worked on AT with lots of moving advice, be sure to check out the comments of this post

You can also try typing in "move" or "moving" in the search box on the Unclutterer.com blog homepage. Also, for all the threads on moving in this forum, click on the tag "moving" in the top right of this site :o)

Good luck! Let us know how you do!

Posted 1 year ago #
Zebra
Member

Hi MichiganMess

I’ve been in the position of having to dramatically reduce my stuff due to moving and I’ve also lived with a housemate who had a lot of (read too much) stuff.

What you have done with the (heavy) books sounds brilliant and giving the stationary you no longer need to your brother is a good idea. If I were starting to sort my stuff now then I would start by listing every category of stuff and thinking about how much space it occupies now and how much I was willing to let it occupy in my new accommodation. That would give me a rough idea of how much to get rid of. Then I would go through the bulky/heavy/most awkward to transport items first. You need to reduce the volume to fit in your new room and reduce the weight to make it easier to transport. While doing this I would have a couple of bags nearby for any rubbish or recycling I found. I would also have a donate bag nearby for anything else I happened to come across that I knew I didn’t want, but I would not make any decisions I might later regret about items which hold sentimental value.

Where do you expect to do your hobbies in your new apartment? Some craft stuff is easier than others to use in a shared space. I have given away a lot of my stuff which realistically I would not be able to use due to space constraints and it has made the rest of my stash more accessible to me which in turn means I have actually done more craft activities. So I think you should select only the craft stuff you can imagine using to take with you.

I agree that leaving some stuff in your current room appears the easiest solution given your time constraints so talk to your parents about that. Also talk to your future housemates about what you (plural) want the shared parts of the apartment to look like. When I shared with the person who had more stuff than would fit in their room I found it quite difficult for reasons hard to explain to them. You don’t need to keep everything in your room, but try to only use 1/3 of the joint space for your stuff. This might just be something I felt to be a problem though, so feel free to ignore this last paragraph (or indeed my whole post).

Sorry that this is such a long post. I hope some of it is useful.
Zebra x x

Posted 1 year ago #
chacha1
Member

Hi MichiganMess, welcome to the land o' clutter advice. :-) Without seeing your present and future rooms, one can only speculate, but my GUESS is that many of your present furnishings are fairly low to the ground. Vertical space is your friend when fitting into smaller square footage.

If you have the option of going high, either by stacking your existing bookcases or installing high shelves, start asking friends for help doing so - and make sure your new landlord will allow you to bolt things to the wall!

One array of shelves should suffice for ALL of the books, miscellaneous, and craft supplies you want to take with you into your new life. My guess is you are either starting college or leaving college to start employed life. You will not have the kind of free time you used to for reading, crafting, etc.; you will almost certainly be meeting people and doing more social things in your free time.

Also, if your new room has a closet, take with you ONLY as much of your clothing as will fit in it. See the threads here on a personal uniform, decluttering closets, etc - now is a great opportunity for you to establish your personal style, which doesn't take many individual articles of clothing to accomplish.

See if one of your dressers (or both) can be used in the common space of the new apartment, and shared by all the tenants. Use them as a sideboard, a console, even a kitchen island.

And keep us posted! We happy li'l busybodies here! Good luck!

Posted 1 year ago #
MichiganMess
Member

Hi everyone and thank you so much for all the advice. To answer a few questions:

I've been out of college for a few years, but because of the costs of housing locally, I have waited until a couple friends moved into the area to split the cost.

I'm actually on vacation in the Upper Peninsula right now (a trip I planned a while ago and wasn't about to miss), but when I get home the whirlwind of planning and packing begins.

Storage in the new apartment is pretty minimal. My room has a decent sized closet and I should be able to fit all of my clothes in that and one dresser (no clothes hound here, klutzgrrl, I have more books than I have articles of clothing -- undergarments included). All of my furniture is pretty low to the ground and I'll have to look into some wall shelves (our lease allows for them to be put up) to make some additional storage.

Unfortunately my hobby is rather bulky. I quilt, which means lots of fabric, plus the sewing machine and thread). If I condense that as much as possible, I can probably get everything to fit into my toy box (2ft x 3ft) and under the bed. The bed is about a foot off the ground, but I have these great lifters that will give it some additional height.

Ideally I will only take one dresser, the nightstand and the toy box with me. The nightstand can double as a computer stand (I use a laptop).

I plan on moving as much as possible next weekend. Everyone cross your fingers and wish me luck!

Posted 1 year ago #
irishbell
Member

michiganmess: good to see another michigander here! I'm on my way to northern Mich myself to our cottage. It's been a beautiful summer this year, hasn't it?
good luck with the moving!

Posted 1 year ago #
Demerna
Member

I would suggest that you step back and take a really hard look at all of your stuff. Look at your stuff and think about having to move all of it 3, 5, or 10 times over the next decade or so, is it really worth moving that many times? A lot of furniture is nice to have (nightables, 2nd dressers, bookshelves, large mirrors, etc...) when you own a house, however for an apartment renter/roomate situation they can become more hassle then they are worth.

The best gift that I was given when I got my first apartment were two large heavy duty plastic totes (I wasn't impressed when I got them). However, I can pack them full of stuff when I move, fill them full of out of season clothes, or stack them on top of each other toss over a piece of cloth and have a night stand, handiest things ever created. If you got a couple you could fill them full of your quiliting supplis and use them as a night stand. Also I would look to stackable folding bookshelves, again, very handy and easy to move <http://www.amazon.com/Stackable-Folding-Bookshelf-2d-Natural/dp/B000P7L1WY>

Posted 1 year ago #
charmed2482
Member

ok, i didn't read all the previous posts. with book, I just got rid of a bunch b/c I checked my local library to see what they had and I got rid of all the books that the library had b/c I can check them out anytime I want.

Is your craft stuff currently organized. If its not you might want to go through it all and do a major craft purge. How many different crafts do you do, maybe pick one or two things you can focus on and let the rest go. I had all kinds of crafts stuff from crafts I wanted to do, but never got around to, so I decided to focus on a couple of things and let the rest go, that reduced my craft clutter by a lot.

you can probably give those bookshelves away using Freecycle or Craig's list, if you life them for free.

Just decide exactly what you want your room to look like and feel like and get rid of anything that doesn't fit into that.

Posted 1 year ago #
MichiganMess
Member

Irishbell: The summer is amazing. We had a little bit of rain this weekend, but today is sunny and beautiful.

Demerna: That bookshelf is amazing! Thanks so much for the tip. I love the heavy duty plastic totes, and actually asked for some for my birthday. No luck though.

Posted 1 year ago #
valrichardson
Member

I'm having to do a major decluttering this summer because I didn't purge before we moved into this house six years ago. We have lots of big storage closets that we crammed full of boxes that haven't seen the light of day since moving. I actually had to rent a storage unit this summer because there was no closet space left! I'm digging deep into each closet and doing what I should have done six years ago. And it feels great!

Posted 1 year ago #
JuliaJayne
Member

My son has one of those stackable folding bookshelves. They are surprisingly sturdy.

Posted 1 year ago #
Vivace
Member

I also have a couple of those folding bookshelves. They're sturdy, reliable and they are a GODSEND when you're moving. I can definitely recommend them.

Posted 1 year ago #
trillie
Member

I really like that those bookshelves are stackable! I own a few Ikea IVAR, and I already thought they are pretty versatile, but they would be even better if they were stackable!

A friend of mine made himself about 20 square stackable boxes out of wood that he can stack differently: Either as storage for random stuff (stacking them like normal boxes, opening on top), or as different bookshelves (with the opening to the side, either stacking them pyramid-like or straight on top of one another). Depending on how many books/fabric you have, this might be a solution for you?

You could also generally try looking for multitasking furniture in the future, like an ottoman with storage inside, or a bookcase with a fold-away desk for your laptop.

Have you seen the entries for the Small, Cool Contests at Apartment Therapy? Of course, there is lots of money and designer stuff involved, but some of the space saving ideas in those apartments are genius and easy to copy. And if you're any into DIY, have you seen the blog Ikea hacker? There are quite a few gems there, too.

Posted 1 year ago #
chacha1
Member

I used the folding, stackable bookcases for years and still have a couple of them; they are great. If you get the kind that has a console top rather than an open top, can even work for extra storage in a kitchen. I got mine from homedecorators.com, they were very similar to the Winsome shelf at Amazon but less expensive.

Posted 1 year ago #

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