Boxes of books

5 Comments

Some things are definitely out of copyright:

He had forty-two boxes, all carefully packed,

With his name painted clearly on each:

But since he omitted to mention the fact,

They were all left behind on the beach.

—The Hunting of the Snark

Actually, I have only twenty boxes so far. That's all the books from the living room and dining-zone, including the graphic novels. (It's kind of hard to distinguish between graphic novels and comic books; for the present purposes, the former are the ones that have printing on the spine so I can keep them on my bookshelves. The comics are mostly already in boxes of their own.) There are another, oh, four or five boxes' worth of books in my room waiting to be packed, counting the roleplaying books and the computer manuals I've worked on and the erotica and the digest-sized magazines, and the language reference books (which I keep within easy reach of my computer desk). And the books and magazines (mostly short fiction) in the to-read stacks on my floor. Also lots of papers to be boxed—there isn't enough time to sort them before moving—and computer equipment. I can leave the kitchen for last; the first priority is to clear off all the furniture so it can be moved. Any boxes and unboxed stuff that the movers don't get to, I can take over myself afterward.

I know Tim and Heather said not to do a piecemeal move. But so far doing a few boxes a night is way less stressful than trying to pack the whole apartment all at once would be.

Do I empty out the filing cabinets and the dresser and put the contents in boxes? Or do I just have the movers move them complete with contents? I'm not sure.

Today I hired a cleaning person for the first time ever. She was recommended by A & P. She cleaned the whole house; now I feel like I can finally start taking stuff over there. A couple nights ago I attended my first Homeowners Association meeting. Today I made arrangements for my cable modem and phone to be switched over next Wednesday, which is moving day.

The whole thing is finally beginning to seem a little more real.

5 Responses to “Boxes of books”

  1. Philip Brewer

    I’ve had a file cabinet moved in a non-empty state by movers. Several times it worked fine, but the last time one of the drawers got messed up.

    It could be either accumulated damage or a function of the weight of the contents. (I’m inclined to blame the latter, but I don’t know. Maybe it was just bad luck.)

    Next time I need to move a file cabinet, I’ll get some bankers boxes and empty it.

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  2. Jenn Reese

    If you have a contract with your movers, it will generally say whether you can leave the drawers full or not. But definitely tape them closed and secure them if they’re full.

    Wow, Jed. It’s finally happening! So cool!!!

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  3. Tim Pratt

    Glad you’re finally on your way, Jed!

    The piecemeal move thing worked for us well at first, but by the third week or so we were getting seriously sick of running back-and-forth. YMMV, of course.

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  4. Celia

    As people above said, I think it depends on who’s moving your stuff and what they say. From my experiences with a major office move, I’d say empty the filing cabinets (they make boxes that are exactly the right size to hold hanging files, which makes packing them *so* easy.), as if they get mixed up it’s a pain and a half to sort them out, but dressers and such probably don’t need emptied. At most, even if they get tossed around, you’d just have to refold clothing which is what you’d have to do if you packed the clothes anyways. From my own personal experience, if you pack your clothes in boxes, you will move in, unpack about half of them, the ones with all the clothes you actually wear on a regular basis, and tell yourself you’ll unpack the others ‘next weekend’ for up to a year. 😉 But then again, I may be very lazy.

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  5. Simon Owens

    A&P…ironically I just reread the John Updike story with the same title today. I generally don’t like the typical coming-of-age story, but I enjoyed this one.

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