Mumzilla’s guide to packing

If you follow me on social media you may or may not know that we are moving house. Not just moving – moving to a house we have bought! Our very own house! That I can paint badly and then get a proper decorator to fix and where I can hang wonky pictures that will fall off the wall in the middle of the night causing the entire household to inadvertently shit themselves in new-house-is-haunted terror. Excited!!

Anyway, as everyone knows, moving involves that horror of horrors – packing (unless you are a spy type doing a moonlight flit. I’ve always wanted to use that phrase, sorry) God I hate packing. Hate it with a passion. When I left home for uni my life consisted of a suitcase and two cardboard boxes. By my second move in London, I was humping suitcases back and forth up and down the Piccadilly line for an entire weekend almost giving myself 17 hernias. I’m pretty sure the gallant gentleman who helped me down the steps at Parson’s Green wasn’t expecting the bags to be full of my books. Sorry, kind man, for any torn muscles.

By the time I moved in with now-Husband, I needed a man with a van. I was also pregnant at the time (yeah yeah I know) and so I didn’t have to do any lifting or packing that time, hurrah!  Husband rocked up with one bag and a box. How did I need a van and he could literally carry all his worldly possessions? Very unfair.

The move from that house to this wasn’t too bad, as it was tiny. I did all the packing and we hired a removals guy to help us actually move. The only furniture we owned was the sofa and Rian’s bedroom stuff. Now however, oh man. We have beds and shit. An extra sofa has appeared, our house has been overtaken by plastic tat, and I have an addiction to large kitchen appliances that I use twice then stuff in a cupboard.

So this move has required two trucks and a partial breakdown over the amount of packing, which naturally I did (as well as working, cooking, pretending to clean, child and puppy wrangling…!) So while I plan on NEVER moving EVER again (fingers crossed) I have come up with a guide to moving house. It’s pretty easy.

  1. Get a skip and throw AT LEAST half your stuff in it. You don’t need it.
  2. Pay someone to come and pack the other half up.
  3. Bribe your friends to come help you unpack on the other end
  4. Gin.

So there you go – how I survived moving house. Friends and gin. Come to think of it, that’s pretty much how I survive life. 

16 thoughts on “Mumzilla’s guide to packing

  1. I’m already trying to get rid of crap we don’t need. We have to move before the daughter turns 2 so she can have her own room. I don’t like moving and packing. The sooner it’s over the better! #FridayFrolics

  2. Yeah, that sounds about right. Moving can be a bitch – we moved about six months ago and it was only down the road, but it still sucked big time. Throwing stuff away is key – it’s amazing how much crap we can accumulate. #FridayFrolics

  3. Your plan is spot on! If you are like me you will swear never to move again and then a couple of years later you find yourself being seduced by Right Move. Never go near Right Move again. #FridayFrolics

  4. We bought what can only be described as a bit of a wreck for our first house, so spent 6 months renovating whilst also pregnant AND learning to drive!, utter madness lol. Next time, no projects, and ideally no packing if I can get out of it! #FridayFrolics

  5. Oh my god I have all this to look forward to.. or not! I have so much tat and about 300 books. It’s gonna take me a month to move! But once we are in our new house in August I will never be moving again! All my tat can rot around me!!!

  6. I have moved more times than I care to count. I almost always say this is my last move, Something happens and I’m on the road again. Moving is painful, no doubt about it. When I move I aim to bring with me only the things I love, use, or believe to be beautiful. I keep that in mind as I’m going through closets and packing up.

  7. Ha ha, I think this advice should be for life in general, I need to chuck half my possessions into a skip and drink more gin! #ablogginggoodtime

  8. My husband was in Mexico when I had to pack up and move our house. The first room I packed was the kitchen. I ate out every meal! Prekids of course! #ablogginggoodtime

  9. My husband and I both have said that the next time we move, we hope we’re being carried out feet first.
    Having said that, our kids keep growing up and moving out and taking apartments and then moving into other apartments and then buying a house . . .
    I’m afraid we’ll never entirely escape it!

  10. Hahha oh I will definitely be needing all the gin! We plan to move next year. We were selling last year but it fell through and as I was pregnant we took it off the market. I couldn’t face moving whilst being heavily pregnant! I still don’t think I can face moving with two children!!! We will definitely be using a removals and packing service, despite the cost, I don’t think I can do it any other way!

  11. We moved house in January and my office is filled to the gills with unpacked boxes and clean hanging laundry. HELP. Do I just open th ebottle of gin, and the people show up to unpack? I’m in! M’wah to you! xoxo

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