T-Minus 322 days: We have a lot to pack!

 We have 46 weeks left before we move. I thought it might be fun to ask "If we pack one room per week, could we get it all done?" I identified 35 areas of our house that need to be packed: garage, storage room, pantry, kitchen, hall closet, kids rooms, the kids closets, etc etc. If we pack one area per week we will only have 10 weeks to spare!

After identifying the 36 areas of our house, the next thing I did was list the rooms and then select the one room I thought should be done absolutely last. That was: The essential kitchen items. We have to eat and we have to cook. We don't need to have everything that is in our kitchen available right up to the last moments, but we do need some basic items. So, the essential kitchen items went into June 2021 to be packed last.

Then, I looked at the list again and pick the next item that should be last. Of course, that was the master bedroom. Sure, there might be some things we can pack along the way. But when I say "packed" I mean it is ready for someone to walk into the room, grab the items, and put them on a truck. My bedroom is going to be the last for that! So, the week before the kitchen gets done, we'll do the master bedroom.

I repeated this process, putting each location in order. The kitchen and bedrooms will be done last. The garage and the rooms in the basement will get done first. Everything else fits somewhere in between.

I can't imagine we'll stick to this schedule. But what this exercise showed how much work we have yet to do, and there really isn't a lot of time to waste. We work all week and have a lot of things going on - finding time every week to complete packing one area is going to be difficult. But that is pretty much the pace we'll need.

As I already mentioned, packing isn't just purging and spring cleaning. It is getting the area ready to be loaded onto a moving truck when the time comes. That means (in addition to purging and cleaning) boxing things, labeling items so we know where they are going, etc. It also means that for a while we might be living out of boxes for some of our non-essential items. But there is no way we can wait until the end and do all this work within a few weeks.