102. Moving Series: Episode 2 of 5: 6 Weeks Out

We're rolling right along, preparing for your summer move. Hopefully you see now how fast the last two weeks went, and how ONLY having 6 weeks to get everything done really isn't a lot of time. In this episode, you'll receive new checklist items to pack, and you'll be making more phone calls. Just remember, the more you do now, the less you'll hate your loved ones later. :) 

Transcript

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Okay, today is episode two of the moving series, which means we are six weeks out from moving day. For those of you just joining us, I appreciate you being here. It means that you are a subscriber and you are probably moving this summer. If you have not listened to episode one of the moving series, I do encourage you to go back and do that at some point today. You don't have to stop this episode in order to do that, but it will give you a list of things to do as though you started two weeks ago with everyone else. For those of you who have already listened to the first episode, today is gonna feel probably not as jarring just because you understand the timeline now, you understand the concept, and you understand that having six weeks really is not a lot of time. Let me also say this. I thought about this the other day. For those of you who have ever gotten married, you will understand this timeline because a lot of wedding planning happens really far out. There's a lot that you have to secure, a lot that you have to decide, a lot that you have to do. Because if you went to someone and said, Hey, I'm getting married in six weeks, and they said, Well, what all of you done? And you say, Well, not really anything, but I have time, they would just laugh in your face. Because wedding planning takes a long time to get all of the parts together. There's a lot of moving parts. So, with that said, let's talk about the six-week mark and what it means. Basically, when you say, I have six weeks until I move, you are no longer concerned with being organized in your home and in your space. The focus now becomes on the move and getting organized for the move. And we talked in the last episode how a lot of people wait till the last minute to pack because maybe they're gonna have a dinner party, maybe there's a holiday, maybe they get nervous looking at blank walls and maybe they're not sleeping on their best sheets. And a lot of people want to actually live in the space until the very last minute, and that will cause so much more stress than if you prepared early on, and you almost used your home as a hotel room near the end, if that makes sense. And you probably will near the end, but we're not gonna talk about that today. I just want to mentally prepare you that you cannot live in your home the way that it is past the two-week mark. Okay, so what we're doing at the six-week mark is we are actually packing up the majority of the house to where when we get to the four-week mark, that's when we're really gonna start getting down and not using our furniture, not using our regular utensils, not using our regular beauty products. We are moving towards, okay, we live here right now. Yes, we have a roof over our heads, but starting at six weeks, it's not gonna look the same. And so you can keep the comfort of your own bed, you can keep the comfort of your couch, you can keep the comfort of your dining room table wherever you work, your desk is assembled, you can do all of that for the next two weeks. But I want you to understand that between now and the four-week mark is where we get rid of everything that is not a necessity. So all decor gets packed. Okay, everything comes off the walls. And if you're in a rental, this will give you time over the next two weeks as you pull things down from the walls to also patch the walls. Because in order to get your security posit back, most of you know you need to patch those holes. And it's also just the right thing to do. It makes you feel like you're moving on without leaving a huge mess behind you. If you are selling your home, again, you're handing over the keys to somebody else, and yes, you can leave it their problem, but why do that? As you go along, you're gonna feel a lot better knowing that my stuff is off the wall, my stuff is packed up, the holes are patched, the next person that comes in can actually come in with a really good feeling that the home was taken care of and it was delivered to us in a very respectful manner. So I encourage all of you to really start thinking about that as you count down these next six weeks because it's not just about you and it's not just about your stuff. It's about trying to create this really good transition to where you feel good about it, the next homeowner feels good about it. And then when you go to unpack, you don't have this feeling of, okay, I rushed this and now this is broken. And when I ripped it off the wall, it left a big mark or hole, rip in the wallpaper, whatever the case is, you feel like you've actually put the work into it and you've taken the time. Okay, so while we're talking about decor, let's just go ahead and really talk about it, okay? So at the eight-week mark, we talked about saving whatever boxes we can. So for those of you who get Amazon, Target, Walmart, Wayfair, anything that comes to you in a box, hopefully you've already saved at least a handful of boxes. So at the six-week mark, I don't want you to think about, oh, I've got to go out and buy boxes. You're still trying to collect boxes. If you don't have that many, if you're not doing a lot of shopping and you don't have a lot of boxes that just come to you naturally, this is when you can get on a neighborhood app and you can say, Hey, does anybody have any boxes? Most of the time, you're gonna see a lot of those types of posts where someone will say, Hey, I just moved and I have a lot of boxes. If you can come pick them up today, they're on the porch. So start looking for those types of posts. You can also get on there and be proactive and say, I'm moving pretty soon and I need to start packing. Does anyone have any extra boxes? Even if they're small, even if they're not in the best shape, even if they're Amazon or they're not perfect, or you've written on them, because that's not a big deal. And most of the time you will have at least a few people that have said, I have five or six boxes if you want to pick them up, or I just moved and I have a ton of bubble wrap. The one thing I would be careful of is when you go to get boxes or really anything from people, I would inspect each one first before you get it into the car. And the reason for that is some people have used boxes that have been in very dirty conditions. They've either been in outside storage units that have a lot of dust and bugs, especially in the south. You want to make sure you're not bringing a brown recluse in with the box. Definitely look at who you're getting the items from. And if you go to pick up some of these things and you just don't have a good feeling, you're like, well, these are really damp, or they've got a lot of cobwebs on them. I would just inspect everything first. And what you could always do is say, hey, at the very last minute, hey, I don't think I need that many boxes. Maybe I'll just take one or two. It's one of those things where a lot of people don't think about it until after it's happened and they're like, oh no, we we ended up getting some boxes that have some spiders in them, or worse, there is worse than a spider, if you know what I mean. So just keep that in mind. Not to scare you, but just keep that in mind. Okay, so what I want you to do week six, I want you to start taking things off the wall, and I want you to just start placing them down on the floor, like lean them up against the wall. So you're physically taking them off the wall. And that may seem like it's not a huge step, but it really is because most of the time people will go by a picture in their hallway and they'll say, Oh, that won't take me very long. I'll do that later. Once you actually go through and take every single picture off the wall and you sit it on the floor, I want you to pay attention to how much time that took. Now, some of you may be in a very small space, you may be in a one or two bedroom apartment, you may be in a tiny house, you may be in a condo. But I I still want you to do this step because once something is off the wall, it feels like it's ready. It feels like the time has come. And that's the feeling you need to have at six weeks out. You don't want to wait to have this feeling at four weeks out or two weeks out. This is the week. And if for some reason you drop off the face of the earth after this episode, let's say you get super busy and you can't listen to the other moving episodes, just remember this. This second episode, six weeks out, is one of the most important episodes. This is the episode between now and four weeks out. You are going to get the most done, period, for your own sanity, for your health, for the sake of your schedule, and for the sake of everyone around you. The more you can do between week six and four, the better off you're gonna be. And it's also gonna give you a really good snippet of how much time everything is gonna take. Okay. So even if you just have two picture frames hung up on two different walls, your job is to take the picture off the hook, put it on the floor, lean up against the wall, do that with both pictures, go get paper or bubble wrap. Even if you don't wrap the entire picture frame, you want to at least wrap the corners. So when you put it inside of a box and the next picture frame goes in on top of it, there's a little bit of a distance between the actual glass of the picture frames. So you don't have to get crazy. You don't have to wrap up the whole thing to where it's completely covered two or three times over. All you want to do is make sure you're creating a little bit of a distance so that they don't clank together. And then you also want to protect the corners so that they don't get chipped. I know there has to be some kind of little gadgets on Amazon or like little picture frame tip covers, like for the corners. If you find those and you like those, or maybe you've got little foam pieces that you want to slide over those, that's fine. Just make sure you put some kind of protection between the glass, between the two pieces of glass. You also want to make sure with frames, you're using a shallow box. You do not want to put them in a big heavy box because you're not going to be able to put that many items in there together, and you don't want to put the frames in with other decorative items like vases. You don't want anything heavier than the picture frame or the glass to actually push up against it. This is really good if let's say at some point you ordered a whiteboard. Okay, let's say you ordered a whiteboard and you kept the box and you're getting ready to move. A whiteboard is not really going to break in transit. A whiteboard is something you literally could put in a trash bag and tape up the trash bag around it and then just put a little label on it that says whiteboard. Plus, whiteboards are easier to replace if they get damaged. So I wouldn't be as worried about that. But most of them will come in a box. I would take that box and use it for your pictures or your picture frames or your artwork. That's what I would use that box for. And if you can slide one or two in there with a little bit of space in between, you want to label it fragile, you want to tape it up so that it doesn't pop open. And what you can do with that box is you can leave that box in the hallway leaning up against the wall for now. But the goal is to get everything off the walls, to get everything wrapped. So if you don't have bubble wrap at this point and you haven't found anything on like a nextdoor app or a Facebook marketplace, then this is where you can go ahead and get one small roll of bubble wrap. Okay. In the first episode, I talked about how following this series, I want to save you guys money. And what happens is when you get really close to moving, people really freak out because they don't want to make multiple trips to the store. So they end up getting three or four rolls of bubble wrap. They end up getting tons of packingslash craft paper. They end up going to get tons of boxes, and then they don't use all of them in all of the different sizes. So with six weeks out, you're gonna order one small roll of bubble wrap. And then when it arrives, it may even arrive in a box, which would be a very happy accident. So then you can use that box for something else, you can use the bubble wrap on your items, it all works out. You wanna make sure that you have one little roll of packing tape. Some people like the big packing tape guns. I don't. I feel like I always cut my finger on the little blade. I feel like the actual big handle isn't really easy to maneuver. I like the little scotch packing tape, heavy-duty rolls. They're red, they're really tiny, and they're easier to pack up if you've got to go to the storage unit and pack up some stuff. If you just want to keep it in your car, if you've got to go to the post office and you need to pack something up really quick, those are easier to carry around and they don't seem to get stuck on things like other packing material. So that's what I prefer. I have a client who loves the little packing gun. He's like, Where's the gun? And I'm like, no, we're using these little things. And he's like, Well, I like, and I'm like, then you can go get it. And we have that type of banter, that type of relationship. So we joke with each other, like, you can go get whatever you want, but I'm packing this box and this is what I'm using. So I would get on and I would plan to limit my purchase to $30. Okay. So if you get on Amazon, and better yet, usually the overnight delivery fee, not delivery fee, but the minimum is $25, right? So I would actually make your budget $25. Even if you can't get the stuff overnight, even if it's like a two-day ship, I would still limit my purchase at six weeks out to $25. Okay. Because you can always order more. You do have time. You have time as far as having things shipped to you. You do have time as far as shipping things out. But what I don't want is for you to think, oh, I have so much time. I'm gonna start two weeks from now. So you're pulling everything off the walls. If you do have vases that have fresh flowers in them, you can have one. Okay. From six weeks to four weeks, you can keep one. If you've got one on your kitchen counter that you're like, I always have flowers here, it makes me happy. That's fine. But you need to start thinking about all of these other rooms that you have. If you have vases, if you have candles, little frames and pictures and wood blocks and live, laugh, love, whatever. This is the time where all of those things get packed up. And so you're not just going out and getting moving boxes. What you're looking for at this stage is what kind of box can I get that will fit this vase? If you pack up vases together more than one, I would not pack more than two or three in one box. And never, ever, ever pack something fragile like a vase in a larger box. It doesn't even matter what else is in it, okay? Because a lot of those larger boxes are harder to maneuver. Even if you write fragile, even if you put it down in a big comforter, like say you're putting a comforter in a large box and you're like, Oh, I'll just shove this vase down in here. Trust me, someone's going to forget. Someone's going to open that box and pull out the comforter, and there goes your vase. Or two people are trying to carry a large box, and even though it says fragile, maybe they knock into something. So with everything small, with everything fragile, you want small, fragile boxes. And you have the option too of putting your item like a vase into a small box just for that. It fits perfectly. It goes right in there. You don't even have to have any packing material. And then say you put that box into a medium-sized box. And I'm not telling you you have to go get a ton of boxes. I'm just saying if you're someone who stumbles across a lot of either moving boxes or Amazon boxes, you can utilize these to where you are packing a box within a box. If you've ever worked in retail, you know this concept where you open a big box and within it, you've got five or six smaller boxes of the actual merchandise. I was an assistant manager for Pier One for a number of years. And so we opened a lot of inventory. We also had to pack things up and send them to other stores. And so you just want to make sure you keep some of these things isolated and they're not clanking up against something else and they don't have a lot of room to move. And you don't have to make it to where it can tumble down a stairs and survive, but you do want to make it to where it's not moving around a lot within a box. So if you get packing paper, again, you can get that off Amazon. Big sheets of packing paper. You can crumble them up into little balls and you can actually shove them down into the vase on the inside, and then you can bubble wrap the outside. You can get little foam pieces and you can kind of put foam down in there. But this is the time where you're actually going to spend the time to pack up your decorative pieces. As far as patching up holes in the wall, there is an all-in-one little item that I love. And I forget the brand. It's basically a little tube. I got it at Target. If you type in wall repair or wall patching kit, it is a little white tube. And the lid that screws off actually is a little sandpaper lid. And then on the other end, there's just a flat, flat piece that's like a scraper. And like I said, it's an all-in-one thing. You basically squirt the wall repair stuff into the hole. And then you take the scraper that's built in, then you scrape off the excess to make sure that it's flat on the wall. You let it dry. And then once it dries, I would give it probably like an hour or two. Then you can take the sandpaper side that's the lid, and you can actually sandpaper that spot until it's smooth in the wall. So between my little scotch packaging tape and this little tool, there were so many things I was able to do, and it didn't take up a lot of space. And I actually had a little basket where I kept both of those, along with the Sharpie marker, and then also little index cards. You want to get cheap index cards. Don't worry about labels. I know we're called labeled over here, but you don't actually need sticky labels, and sometimes they don't stay on the box anyway. What you can get, you can get blank index cards that are like 89 cents for 50 or for a hundred. And then what you're gonna do is you're gonna write on that index card kitchen, and then you put that on the box and you secure it with your packing tape. That's gonna stay a lot more secure. And you don't have to get super specific. You basically just want to know what room that box is gonna go into. Now, if it's something to where you're like, listen, when we get to the new place, it has to be the first thing that I unpack on that same index card under kitchen. You could put big skillet or you could put spatula or juice container. You know, whatever you're packing up, you can put the main thing that you know is in there. And if you're packing yourself, sometimes you'll remember what else you're putting in there because you're either putting in like items or you're putting in items that kind of live together in a cabinet or a drawer. So everything comes off the walls and your patching walls. This is also the time you're gonna notice if any big repairs need to be done in your house. Now, if you're selling your home, I'm assuming there's already been an inspection or there will be an inspection. If you are already doing this before the inspector comes, that's only gonna help your cause. That doesn't mean that you are going to make thousands of dollars if you repair holes in the wall, but it's gonna give it a much better appearance. And if there's anything that needs to be fixed, like if you've got a baseboard that needs a new piece, if there's something wrong with like a little light bulb or with a refrigerator, or let's say the washer or dryer needs to have maintenance, this is when you go ahead and call someone. If you have a landlord, this is when you reach out to the landlord and you say, Hey, I know I told you two weeks ago that I'm, you know, I gave you my 60 day note. Notice everything looks pretty good, but I did notice when I was taking down my curtain rods that there is a problem with the window. There's a leak. Or I saw a little bit of mold. Or, you know, I was in the kitchen and I was pulling my stuff out from under the sink, and it looks like the sink is leaking a little bit. Those things will really go a long way to make sure that the transition is just a little bit nicer. And they will respect you for that. And you won't feel like near the end of this adventure trying to get to the next place that, okay, now all of a sudden it's a bigger problem and now it's my problem. And we've only got a week or two before we move. So if you notice something at six weeks out, go ahead and put in the maintenance order. Go ahead and call the guy. Go ahead and have a family member who's a handyman, handy woman come over. This is also when you're going to take down your televisions if they are mounted. And you're like, no, no. We want to watch the TV right up until we move. I understand. I completely understand. I had three TVs the last place that we lived. At six weeks out, I took down one. Now it doesn't mean that you have to put the little feed on the bottom and it sits on the TV stand. For me, what I did was out of the three TVs, the one that we weren't using the most, I took it down. I patched the holes. I went ahead because one of the TVs I still had a box for. And so I went ahead and put that TV in a box. All of the hardware from the TV mount, I got a Ziploc bag and I put bedroom TV mount, you know, whatever it was. And then also because I had already been to my storage unit at eight weeks out, I also knew that I had some extra hardware for the TV mount. And I also had the little cheat sheet for where you put it up on the wall and you can make your little marks for the TV mount. All of that was in my storage unit in a tote called miscellaneous hardware. So what I did was I pulled the miscellaneous hardware and the hardware from our house and I put it all in one Ziploc bag so that when we got to the new place, if I needed different hardware or I needed that cheat sheet, now it was all together. And I knew that it all belonged to that one TV and it wasn't going to get mixed in with anything else. I made sure that that remote control went in that bag. I made sure that little Roku TV gadget went into that box. So all of that went together and I knew it was supposed to be kept together. So I did keep two TVs at six weeks out, but I had to at least negotiate with one because I knew that I didn't want to be in the final week of moving and I have to take down TVs. That's dreadful. And then I also knew I had to patch the holes. And so you start thinking of all these lists in your head. So at six weeks out, everything comes off the walls. If you've got mirrors, mirrors come down. If you have mirrors that hang over a door, don't worry about those yet. You can wait until a week or two out. Because a lot of times that mirror is there because you don't have a full-length mirror. If you have a full-length mirror that's on a stand or it's part of your actual bedroom decor and it's big and it's hanging, it needs to come off the wall and it can sit on the floor for a while. Okay. Because you're pulling everything down, you're patching, it can live on the floor if it's a full-length mirror that you use every single day. Now, at two weeks out, you're not going to be able to do that. You're going to have to start wrapping it, figuring out if it's heavy, who's going to lift it closer to the door. If you've got movers, you don't really need to worry about that. But if you're moving yourself, you don't want to save all the heavy stuff until moving day. Sometimes you have to get it closer to the door. So at four weeks out, we'll talk a little bit more about that. You want to call the packers, you want to call the junk haulers. I've said this before. If you're going to use a moving company, I don't always recommend you use their people to pack. In my experience, the people that move are not good packers, period. What you want to look for is a professional organizer or an actual professional packer. Some people won't advertise this way. Some people clump their services with, you know, maybe house cleaning, but they're not necessarily a mover. So they may not advertise themselves as an organizer, but they're probably also not going to advertise as a mover. So you may just want to take a look. Sometimes interior decorators would be able to do something like this because they're used to handling and packing certain items. So that's something that you can look for. If there are any items whatsoever that have to be thrown away and they're bigger, like furniture, sometimes the city will pick something up on the curb. You just have to call and tell them that it's out there. And every area is different. Some people are like, no, absolutely not. You can't put that out there. Sometimes you just have to call ahead to the city and you just say, hey, I need to schedule a pickup. I've got a large item out at the curb. Some people will pick it up before anyone else comes. You can put a big sign on it that says free, even if it's damaged, even if it's all messed up and stained, some people will pick it up and take it. If you have a lot of stuff that needs to be hauled away, now's the time to find a junk hauler. Because believe it or not, some of them don't run every day or every week in your area. When I worked in Indianapolis, there was an area that was about 30 minutes from Indianapolis. And you would think there would have been a junk hauler available in that area, but either everybody was too busy or they didn't go out that far. They only went maybe 15 or 20 miles. And so I ran into someone that said, Yes, I can help your client, but I only go that way on Wednesdays. And so what you're doing is you're planning ahead to where even if the junk caller says, I can come pick up your stuff, but it's gonna be two weeks because I'm out of town next week. You don't want to wait till the last minute and then you're scrambling trying to get this stuff out because nine times out of ten, you can't leave it behind. Some people will negotiate and say, hey, I'll buy some of your furniture, or hey, it's fine to leave it here. We're just gonna tear down the house anyway. But you don't want to wait to find out and you don't want to have to be there or move all that stuff out or organize it on a day that you're really busy at work, or maybe you know your kid has to go do something. So I would do that at six weeks out. Listing items to sell. If there's anything that you can sell on marketplace, on eBay, the six-week mark is when you need to do it. I would encourage all of you who actually have a marketplace account or an eBay account or both. I would challenge you to find two items that you want to sell. Even if you're like, I don't need the money, I don't care, we're gonna have a lot of space. I still want to give you the challenge of trying to sell two items because selling two items could buy some of your packing supplies. And so if there's an immediate trade-off where it's like, hey, I just made $20 selling this one vase, then you can turn around and get your packing tape, your bubble wrap, and some of that stuff off of Amazon. And it's just, it's an even trade. The other thing is that if you don't own an air mattress, I want you to consider buying one in the next couple of weeks. Because one of two things needs to happen as you get closer to moving day. The one or two days before moving day, you are either going to be sleeping on an air mattress, or if you have the money and it's not gonna stress you out, I would suggest staying at a hotel because trying to get all of your stuff out on moving day, trying to get everything cleaned, and this is more so for the people who actually have to move a decent distance away. You may not be moving out of state, but maybe you're moving 45 minutes away. And so once everything is out, then everything has to be cleaned, and you know that once you go to the new house, you're not coming back to that town. Some people will move out and they'll have another week that they can go back and get little stuff. They can pick up screws off the floor, they can pick up random wrappers and take out the trash. That's when they can patch all of their holes and they can actually clean the floor, clean the toilets, whatever they're gonna do. Some people wait until this time to take down their curtain rods. I recommend trying to have it all done by your actual moving day to where if the movers load everything up and there's still some dust bunnies, or maybe you need to wipe off a counter, you know, you may stay behind another hour and get that done. But mentally, if you're out and everything is done when all of your stuff is out, it's just gonna be one less thing you have to go back and worry about. Now, if you have to go back the next day to pick up your deposit, turn in a key, you may try to save a couple of hours and do that when you go back, just so that you can be at the new place to get your stuff unloaded and moved in. But every single thing that you can do before that day is going to take a ton of stress off of you. And remember how I talked about how in bodybuilding the week leading up to the actual moving day is called peak week. This is actually gonna be your week where everything is gonna be done at one week out. And then what you're gonna do for that quote unquote peak week is that's when you're actually gonna be cleaning. That's when you're actually going to be getting all those little things done. That's when you're gonna make sure that all your utilities are transferred. That's when you make sure that everything is out from all the cabinets. You do your double check, check, double check. Um, you're reaching in the back of drawers to make sure you didn't forget anything. You're taking the trash out one last time. So even if there's still trash in the trash can, it's not spilling over after moving day. You want a lot of the stuff to go out before you actually move. The last thing I'm gonna talk about for this episode is if you have any organizers, you're actually going to pack them up over the next two weeks. Okay, if you have drawer organizers, and things are gonna look a little bit silly for a while, okay? Let me give you an example for the kitchen. So let's say in one of your kitchen drawers you have a utensil organizer with all of your silverware. What you're gonna do, you are going to pull out the organizer with all the silverware. You're gonna put down a paper towel, and then just like I said, the Noah's Ark of Moving, you're gonna go two by two. You're gonna leave yourself two knives, two forks, two spoons. Everything else gets packed up, okay? So most of you should have already left yourself the bare minimum as far as utensils, whether it's two or four or six. But like I said, some people have two or three sets of silverware in their kitchen drawer right now and they're moving in six weeks. But not only are you starting to pack up silverware, you're packing up the actual organizer it goes in. This is also the time for you to look at it and say, will this go into my next house? Because guess what? If you say no, if it's cracked, if it's chipped, if it's discolored, you can throw it away now. Okay. It does not go to the next place. If you love it, if you're like, hey, I paid $30 for this organizer at the container store and I love it and it is going to go to the next place. I've already checked. Then this is when you actually find a box that it can go in. And you're also putting in some silverware, you're putting in some extra kitchen towels, your live, laugh, love kitchen towels are going in this round. Okay. So you get stuff off the walls, you make sure you call your junk hauler, you make sure you list a couple of things online, or if you have siblings, best friends that you're like, hey, I know you've always loved this. Do you want it? This is when you gift items. You do it now because when you get really, really serious about packing in two weeks at the four-week mark, I don't want any of this to be left over. This is the time. For those of you planning to have a yard sale, the next two weeks is the perfect time to do it because all you have to do is find the next nicest weekend day. Definitely try to do it on a weekend. Most people during the week that do this stuff, they do not have success. If you have people coming to pick up an individual item, do that during the week. Say, hey, can you come pick it up when you get off work or when I get off work or can we meet up after work? Do that during the week because that actually makes it a little bit easier. On the weekend is when you set up a table. And if you have a piece of furniture, if you have a like a chair that's light enough to carry out to the front yard or to the driveway, over the next two weeks, find the next nicest day. Take the chair out along with one folding table. Because you can have more than one yard sale. And I don't want you to make this a huge commitment where you waste the whole day. You basically, the day before, you put out a sign at the end of the street that says tomorrow yard sale, and you put a little arrow. And then in your front yard the next day, you're gonna put a little sign. You can even tape it to the mailbox and put a couple of balloons. That's all you need. You don't have to put an ad in the paper. You can post on Marketplace or next door, you can say, hey, we're gonna have a pop-up yard sale tomorrow. I've got one upholstered chair, I've got lots of DVDs, I've got some organizers I'm not gonna take to my next house, and I've got some pillows and some stuffed animals and some kids' toys. And that's it. It doesn't have to be all up and down the driveway. If you have a really cheap little rack where you can hang clothes, I always have an extra rack in storage. They're like $9 at Target. The room essentials rack, it's like $9 and it's so lightweight. And you literally just take it out and you assemble it in the driveway, and maybe you have 10 items hanging and that's it. Maybe you have a couple of formal dresses you're not gonna wear, a couple of suits because you're no longer in the corporate world, you have a basket that's full of random shoes, but at least their pair is with them. It's like, okay, these were my running shoes four years ago, and they still look great, but I haven't worn them in four years. This is the time. And you can say, hey, everything's five dollars. Everything out here today is five dollars. Super easy. So when they walk up with three items, you say, okay, $15, they hand it to you, they walk away. This is the time to get all of that set up. You've got two weeks to do it because at four weeks out, I don't want you worrying about putting individual little bitty stickers on every single little item and spending the entire Saturday out there. You want to say, hey, this is from nine to 12 and that's it. No one that comes early is gonna be talked to. Anybody that comes after 12, the garage door is gonna be closed. It's nine to twelve and that's it. And if anybody messages you say, hey, I'm sorry you missed the yard sale. It's still for sale. It's five dollars. If you come pick it up this afternoon, I'll put it on the porch and you can just put money under the mat. And that's just how simple it needs to be. You don't need to push all of your plans aside, all of your grocery shopping, your lunch with friends, you know, watching your kids play soccer because you're camped out in the front yard trying to get people to pay $2 for an old pair of flip-flops. Okay. So do the task, make an effort, but don't put all of your eggs in that basket, if that makes sense. So you're packing organizers. This is also when I want you to get some travel items. I want you to get some travel bottles for your shampoo, conditioner, face wash, body wash. If you have bath towels and washcloths in the bathroom out the wazoo, I want you to pick your absolute worst bath towel. And I want you to pull it out and I want you to cut off the corner. And then that way you'll know, okay, this is now a rag. Then that gets put on the floor. Not necessarily right now, but either when you go to clean up at the very, very end. And the reason why this makes sense is because if you have one floor rag that's almost like a floor mat and you're climbing in and out of the shower, trying to clean the shower in the last couple of weeks leading up to moving, and you're stepping in and out, and you don't want everything to be wet, you don't want your own bath mat because then you have to take your own bath mat and wash it and pack it up. If you have this big old rag and you're moving in four or five days, and you clean the shower, and then let's say it's raining outside. So you take that rag, that big towel, and you put it by the front door, and you're like, hey, everybody, I mopped. The new people are gonna love the floors. They are spotless. When you come in, wipe your feet on this dirty old bath towel because it's raining outside, and you're not gonna track mud into my nice clean floor. And then when you go to move, you pick up that towel and you throw it away. So you're not trying to save a bunch of stuff near the end that you either have to wash and pack up, or you just have to be responsible for. You're really trying to lighten your load so that by the time you move, you're only dealing with paper towels, paper plates, plastic forks, knives, and spoons. You're dealing with rags that can be thrown away. You're dealing with sponges that can be thrown away. And then you are working out of a lot of travel bottles in terms of showering, brushing your teeth, especially at two weeks out, you're gonna have a travel toothpaste by that point. Okay. Or at least at one week out, that's where you're gonna be. So I want you to start thinking ahead. If you go to the container store or if you're at Target and you're like, okay, I don't have any travel bottles anymore. I haven't really traveled in a while. Go ahead and pick up some travel bottles. And also starting at six weeks out, you can wait for sales. Sometimes you will stumble across a sale that's a get a $5 gift card if you spend $30 in beauty. Okay. And sometimes those travel kits will be part of that deal. So, in essence, if you wait for that deal and you're buying whatever beauty supplies you need and you're getting the travel bottles, then when you get that $5 gift card, it pretty much pays for itself. Some people that are coloring their hair at the last minute, there's ways that you can actually like get items that aren't going to come with you. You don't want to get full-blown shampoos at that point, full blown shave gels. But if you start early enough, you can get some pretty good deals on the travel items. So, last thing really quick, I want to talk about bins. There are these little plastic bins. Now, you can get a plastic tote that has a lid and you just don't use the lid, but I feel like that's kind of pointless. There are open bins, and I get them at Target. They're part of the Bright Room series, but it's just a plastic bin that has handles on it. I think they are, gosh, I don't know, five or six dollars a piece, but they're probably the size of maybe like a small laundry basket. And you can even use a laundry basket. But what's great about these little bins is it's a way to organize your moving stuff without actually making a huge commitment for the organizers. And you can carry them around by the handles. And when you're done with them, you can use them in other areas of the house. Like I have one that's under my bathroom sink, and when my towel is dirty, I put it in there. I don't put anything wet into our hamper. You never want to put it into especially a fabric hamper. So when you're done moving, you can actually use these little bins underneath sinks, inside closets. And since they're plastic, you can put like, you know, wet rags in there. And then that way it becomes more of like a place where it's holding on to some of your stuff, some of your laundry stuff until you go to wash it. But I would look into that. At six weeks out, I would look into getting some kind of basket or bin, even if you don't have a specific purpose for it. At some point you are going to be clearing out drawers and clearing out cabinets. And if you're clearing off one whole shelf and you're literally Pulling stuff off of a top shelf, climbing down from the ladder, and then putting it on a table, it's going to take you forever. If you're already up on a step stool and it has a little ledge where you can put stuff on it, you can put that little bin there and you can clear off a top shelf and just shove everything in this bin and then take the bin to a table. And then that way it's organized as it's waiting to be packed, if that makes sense. I think a lot of that is gonna be good for you guys right now. I hate to give you more stuff because this will be time consuming. But again, you're starting early. So I want there to be a balance of I feel a sense of urgency because I know that this is coming, but I don't want you in freak out mode where you feel like you don't have enough time. Because at some point over the next two weeks, one of the tasks that I have given you is going to go wrong in some way. And instead of freaking out about it, I want you to say, Sarah told me this was gonna happen. And the reason she told me to do it at six weeks out was because she knew I would run into a problem and I would need an extra day or two to figure it out. Or I need an extra day or two for this to get shipped to me, or I need an extra day or two before I can go to that person's house and grab their boxes, or I need an extra day or two, or an extra weekend before I can pull things out into the driveway. So from six weeks out to four weeks out these next two weeks, you guys have a lot of tasks where you shouldn't have anything hanging on the walls. If you have to keep up the curtains because you don't have blinds, that's one thing. If you have blinds the curtain rods come down at this point because again, you're patching holes. You're also going to be taking the rods and you're gonna be either wrapping those in some kind of plastic to where they don't slide everywhere. You're gonna be putting the hardware in little plastic bags that actually say living room curtain rod. So then that way you don't have a bunch of random screws just floating around and all the hardware mixed in in your junk drawer. You actually know what it goes to. But I honestly think that those are gonna be the biggest things. Don't worry about taking anything to your storage unit right now. Don't worry about bringing anything from your storage unit. Between weeks eight and six, you should have already done some of that. Now you're focused more on the actual house. Now you're focused on getting stuff out of drawers, out of cabinets, off of tables, down from walls, and you're condensing. You're just every single time you go to do something, you're condensing. At eight weeks, you may have needed six forks. At six weeks, you need four forks. And listen, at four weeks, you're gonna live with two forks, okay? So instead of it being one massive haul, you're looking at it as I'm condensing, I'm condensing, I'm wearing fewer socks, I am writing with fewer pens, I don't need as much paper, I'm not printing as much stuff. I only need, you know, a little ream of paper instead of a whole box of paper. So every little thing you go to do, I can condense that, I can condense that, I can pack that. This is your mentality for the next two weeks. And as long as you do that, trust me, when you have four weeks and all of that stuff is done, it is going to feel like a breeze because then you know, hey, we still have two more weeks to actually start packing some clothes and packing some shoes and packing some bedding, and then we'll still have another two weeks. And then it becomes exciting. Then it's like, hey, we are really on track. If we want to take a night and go to dinner, we can because we deserve a break. And that's a lot different than giving yourself all of these treats along the way, and then saving the last two weeks for packing and calling and sorting and trying to squeeze everything in and having no joy in your life for two weeks. And then you move, and then it's like, well, we still can't have any joy because now we have to unpack and we have no clue where anything is. I hope this episode was helpful. Again, thank you for being part of the bonus episodes. We are going to have a new bonus episode coming out in a couple of days that doesn't have to do with the moving series, and so that's gonna be pretty exciting. If you ever have any questions for me, you can email me at labelorganizing at gmail.com, and you can also follow us on Instagram at labeled organizing. Thank you so much, and I will see you in the next episode.