The Logistics of Packing

This is a guest post by Emily Ozer.  Since becoming a MOT Emily strives and struggles to merge academics with real life to end up with authentic observations. Most of her time is spent working towards her Nursing degree, blogging at david-and-emily.com, and being Army Strong. She is blessed to be married to her beshert, who (grudgingly) agreed to naming their rescued Boxer Gracie Lou Freebush.  This article was first published on david-and-emily.com on May 4, 2012.
It’s started.  The list making.  The box lugging.  The organizational nightmare as we try and decide what’s staying, what’s going, how are we going to load up the storage unit so that we can get everything in it.  The expense of packing supplies, the overwhelming task of trying to be organized about all of it.  Ideally I would like to have a spreadsheet that lists everything in each box/bin and then we could just number them.  I’m not kidding.  I’d like that very much.  Enter reality:

Some of Our Stuff

Try as we might I can guarantee you that we will still end up with boxes/bins that have no labels.
Then there’s the matter of how much stuff we have.  I don’t like stuff.  I don’t like clutter.  I don’t like keeping things just because they had some value when I was 10.  (Mom, I swear I’ll get rid of that trunk up in the barn with my middle school book reports in it this summer.)  Perhaps it’s a side effect of the military – which has had me living out of a duffel bag during deployment, carrying a ruck sack with all the essentials whilst playing in the sand, moving from Norfolk to Whidbey back to NH to Oklahoma, to Texas, to Minneapolis…. back to Texas.
Some of the stuff we have is necessary.  We keep a kosher home so we have 6 sets of dishes: every day meat and milk, passover meat and milk and then our fine china (no Passover fine china though, we’re not that fancy). So we have at least 15 bins full of kitchen stuff. I like books, so there are at least 5 bins full of my books.  I like shoes, purses and dresses so I have a lot of bins and David doesn’t like to throw things away so he has a lot of bins.
We still need to rent out a storage unit and I’d like to start bringing stuff over gradually – it would help keep me from getting all squirrely.
We’ll probably still end up doing it all in one weekend.
*le sigh*