Moving Day - Pack Out Day

One of the easiest ways to reduce stress during a move is to start your preparations early enough. One of worst ways? Pulling an all-nighter to get your house in order while simultaneously trying to pack for being on the road for three weeks between two different climates with two kids and pets in tow. Yeah, we took the second option.

But the hard work and lack of sleep paid off. All we had to do was point and say "This room is UnAccompanied Baggage (UAB), that side of the room is going with us, and that side is going to storage."

Our UAB pile

This is what ~750 lbs of UAB looks like.

Excellent, everything is going according to plan.

I also came up with a pretty easy way to tell the movers which stuff in the garage needed to go where (ship, store, or UAB): the kids play chalk:

Store everything behind the line!

There's always stuff that shouldn't go anywhere.

We had a lot of boxes. Notice how high above the door frame these are stacked:

You know you have too much stuff when they need two trucks to haul it away. But to be fair, one truck is headed to storage and the other is heading to the shipping yard.

So, now all of our stuff is in a shipping container to be loaded on a ship, not unlike this one:

It's not as rare as you might think.

But I suppose the airline can lose or damage your luggage too, so there's really no truly guaranteed way to get stuff from Point A to Point B. Which is why you should carry insurance.