MOVING TIPS & QUIPS

They say that besides death, moving is one of the most stressful situations you can put yourself in. 'They' are right. I am quite exhausted from all the planning and prepping and we haven't even decided on a place yet, let alone start the actual move. I have moved quite a lot in my time, mostly in the same immediate area though. This is a much bigger move, which we have discussed for months, so I have been both mentally getting ready for it and physically (no, I have not been lifting weights or anything).  I thought I would share some of the things I have done in case any of you are thinking of a move or know someone that is or just want to be prepared for the future.  I am not much of a collector but I do own a lot of books.  A few months ago I went through my massive collection and weeded out which ones I was willing to part with.  I am probably going to do this again soon. After I created a stockpile of books I went to my Amazon account where I had created an Amazon seller account, I chose to sell my books, but since I didn't want them in my apartment I shipped them all to Amazon fulfillment to sell, pack and ship. I in turn sat at home and had the profits deposited into my bank account electronically.  Talk about easy peasy. I must have sent them over a hundred books.  That brings my collection down considerably and makes for a lot lighter future moving day. If you don't know about this program, I highly recommend it. The profits are a lot less than if you sold the books yourself, but to not have the headache of packing and shipping one-off books is so worth the extra fee.  Knowing that we were going to move, I had decided when I designed my new studio space to have everything in organized boxes so I could seamlessly transport the studio when the time came and it would be super easy to get back to work wherever we landed.  Instead of having drawers built-in for my custom desk (which I never did show you), I ordered multiples of these letter boxes. All of the things that I would have put in a drawer I put in these boxes, I even went one step further and  added acrylic inserts in them, so everything had a place and I didn't just have boxes of 'stuff' (for the record I don't do well with 'stuff' I don't even like the word). For my shop inventory I bought Kraft photo boxes, they are the perfect size to house the inventory and had the bonus nameplates on the front so I could identify what is in each box. Come moving day all I will need to do is pop the top on them and my inventory is ready to go!  This solution may not work for everyone but I can tell you having my studio 'portable' has made life a lot easier and more organized.  Whatever I don't use on an every day basis I can just move to the garage or the supply closet with ease. My studio space is very small so I need to be able to utilize as much of it as I can.

Now for the quips part of this post.  I am going to have to sell some of my possessions it's time to, but I know that a garage sale is not the place for such precious items as my beloved Gocco and a few of my Lensbaby lenses. Any ideas of how I should go about selling these things? I want to be able to sell some excess paper, envelopes and supplies that I can't throw away, are not that great for donation but would be welcome in the right person's hands. Should I create a moving sale page on the blog? I'm open to suggestions.

P.S. These flowers were for sale at a Farmer's Market in North Carolina.  I loved that the vendor displayed the stems in Kerr jars, so charming!