I’ve been procrastinating on packing easily-packed items because I haven’t been able to acquire very many good boxes. By acquire, I mean “for free.” I know about store garbage bins, but these days the problems with that (where we live) are one, bins are often too tall for me to look into, two, many stores cut their boxes in half as they stock shelves, so they’re not whole anymore, and three, bins are locked at night. Now, the one thing I haven’t done yet is actually go into a store and ask employees “Do you have any boxes?” - I don’t like doing stuff like that. Besides, often they’ll come back with “I think we have a few” and after 15 minutes of waiting for some joe to go to the back and look, you’ll get one or two that might be usable. You end up doing a lot of running around, wasting gas and time to gain your dozen or so boxes. Bah. I suppose I’ll have resort to using that method soon, tho, unless I want to spend $100-$150 in retail stores.

Anyway, I’m getting antsy and I’d like to start packing stuff I don’t need everyday at a faster pace. Like, all done by yesterday. Thus this morning I went to Staples and bought some plain shipping boxes. 6 to be exact. About $3 dollars a box. That just ticks me off…but what can you do. I figured that amount of boxes would pack up the rest of my books, as well as give me an idea of how many more boxes I’ll need. I arrived home, taped the boxes together, and promptly filled two 14×14x14 boxes with reference and paperback books. They’re kinda heavy, but nevermind, it’s manageable. Then I tried using a 20×18x12 box for some hardcover novels. This worked pretty well, since I was able to arrange them in layers of 5 per layer, but I ran into the problem that the box would end up being far too heavy to even lift onto a dolly (wheeled cart). So I had to do two layers of books and pad out the rest of the space with towels and blankets.

Now, between these three boxes, I’ve emptied about 1/4 of the books still on my shelves. Damn. And that doesn’t include things like games, DVD’s, videos, knickknacks, my collection of metal tins (or the boxes of books I already had packed) and so on. I guess I’m going to need another 10-15 boxes just for those kind of items. This has made me realize I’m going to need a lot more boxes than I originally thought. It also makes me realize just how much “stuff” we’ve acquired over 15 years … the last time we moved, we hardly had anything. Seriously. We moved everything (including furniture) in two or three trips using only hubby’s van and my then-very-tiny car. Now we need a bloody moving van rental. There’s a lot of items that don’t need boxes of course - clothes/blankets not used to pad out other boxes can all go in plastic garbage bags. It’s easier, and garbage bags are cheap. I like cheap. Sigh. Moving is such a pain. At least we have plenty of time to get organized.