The Story of Packing While Not Packing at the Same Time

So our road of packing has been interesting. Most people when they move pack up everything, room to room. It takes awhile, but it's methodical. We, on the other hand, like to live a little bit more dangerously. This is the list of piles our stuff was being divided into:

• stuff to take with us (mostly consisting of clothes, jackets, shoes, and electronic devices)
• stuff to store (our bedroom furniture, sentimental stuff, the little bookshelf (only little relative to the big bookshelf and in fact quite a large piece of furniture in its own right), all of my books!)
• stuff my mom is "storing" for us while we're gone (cookbooks, leftover booze)
• stuff Jeff's dad is "storing" for us while we're gone (the tv, the PS3, the piano keyboard, Jeff's hot sauce collection)
• stuff Kenny and Andrea are using (basically our entire kitchen except a few choice items, the couch, the desk, the big bookshelf, all of our food)
• stuff going to Sue's house (the bed)

This division of things led to pure chaos. Packing up the books and sentimental stuff was easy, but after that it became a pure shit show. Our apartment looked like a bomb went off in it for a solid three weeks. The main thing that was slowing us down was that Kenny and Andrea weren't moving into their new place until the Monday after we got back from Oregon, so the big stuff couldn't be moved until then. 

But to get the show on the road, and because we knew that trying to do everything after we got back from Oregon was insane, the weekend before Oregon we rented a UHaul and did most of our moving then. Good wrench in the plan: that was the weekend of the first of three windstorms that went through Spokane in the past few weeks, so on the second day we couldn't get into the storage unit due to a large chunk of the Wandermere area and north of it being without power, and had to put a bunch of stuff in Ken and Julie's garage for a few days). This left us with an apartment that had just a bed, tv, desk (still doing school stuff), kitchen stuff, random, and clothes. 

Then on Monday, I spent the day helping Kenny and Andrea move into their new place, and took a car loaded down with stuff for them. So now our apartment only had a bed, tv, desk, random, and clothes. 

So yesterday morning I woke up with a plan. There was still all this stuff laying around and I needed a system. So I moved everything into the middle of the living room and put post-its on the wall 3 feet apart, each labeled differently: trash, Goodwill, Mom, Ken, Store, Kenny/Andrea. And slowly but surely I made piles and was able to go through the rest of the stuff methodically and quickly. So now there are piles to distributed.

Today Jeff and I "move out" of our apartment and "move in" with Nani and Poppy for a week. I'm borrowing Ken's truck on Friday and coming back here and by the end of the day there will be nothing left in the apartment (that's my goal anyway). The piles will be dispersed. That'll give me two days to clean for our walk through on Monday.

Seven days.