Definitely my least favorite thing to pack up this past weekend was the ‘junk drawer’ in my kitchen. Doesn’t everyone have {at least} one of these in their house? Where all of the random things that don’t really have a home anywhere else go to be forgotten… it seems like a good idea when you have it ~ oh, these 100 things don’t have a home, or I’m not sure if I really want this but it could be useful, so I’ll put it in here. But then come moving time I am faced with what is essentially a drawer full of mostly just crap that I don’t really use that I have to deal with. Do I take the time to go through it now when I’m busy trying to get ready for the movers? Or do I move things knowing I will throw them away ~ which is definitely frustrating and a waste of time and energy.

Earlier this year I decided to do a big purge of my space, to declutter, and to create more space for the things I’m really wanting, and things that are really ‘me’ to come in. I got a good start, but then before I was finished my manfriend and I decided to move in together and of course I am not done purging yet! I guess the energy shifted and everything started moving very quickly, which is amazing, but also now I’m finding myself packing boxes of things that I don’t use, clothes I don’t wear, office supplies I haven’t touched in years… which isn’t the most awesome thing ever.

Things never happen the way we imagine.. in my perfect and wonderful fantasy scenario I would have had time to go through each item I owned, serenely deciding what to keep and what to ‘thank and let go of’ the way that Marie Kondo describes in her book The Life Changing Magic of Tidying Up. And soft music or a great montage would be playing in the background just like in the movies… or at least that’s the way I picture myself going through this process. And I wouldn’t be moving until I was perfectly {and completely} done, of course.

But nothing is as perfect as our imagination makes it out to be. Nope, life raced forward and I’m starting a life and creating a new space with my person… but I’m going to have to finish cleaning out as I unpack. This is making me even more determined to clean out everything I don’t need/use/love… and not re-accumulate the same way. And as we talk about starting to look for a fixer upper to buy, I’m already thinking about packing up again… and don’t want to repeat some of these stresses again!

And then there’s the way that moving always stirs up those primal feelings of being unsettled at the core in me… on an energy level everything gets pretty uncomfortable as I’m changing my home, and ultimate place of safety and security {1st chakra anyone?}. This time around {it having been about five years since my last move} I decided to start moving things to my new place a few weeks early, in the hopes of reducing stress on the actual moving day. In some ways I think it helped but in others I found myself in that uncomfortable, unsettled moving stress for far too long.

Although I’m not sure if my slow self-move over the last few weeks, carload at a time, was worth while in the bigger sense, I did do a few things this time that have minimized my stress and I will make habits moving forward. This time around my life-savers have been – hiring movers {worth. every. penny}, paying for a professional move-out clean of my old place {I almost cleaned it myself, but this was a good lesson in ‘what is your time worth’, and what else could you be doing during that time that is more valuable for yourself}, and I decided to move all of my furniture out and leave my area rugs so that I could have them easily cleaned and fresh for the new space. And last but not least, I did the official move day a few days earlier than my move out deadline. This last one is a deal… it can be so tempting to leave everything until the last minute, but you know what, most of the time we need a few days to get the space really cleaned out and ready for the next person… everyone does. And I have piece of mind knowing that I will have the time to get that done without being overly rushed and stressed. I can’t tell you how often we arrive at a final walk through for a client and the sellers aren’t done moving out, or don’t have the space clean… totally unavoidable.

What are some of your tried and true moving habits? I might be saying goodbye to pre-move day carload self-moving, but as I unpack, the purging continues {no junk drawers in our new place!}, and I will definitely make the most of the time I save by having someone clean my old place!