Organizing and Labeling Your Boxes for Moving

After reading a ton of advice online - and more importantly, talking to the movers - I came up with a game plan for labeling the boxes for our move, color-coding them to both the floor and the room using stickers and labels. 

The new house has three floors, so I looked for a pack of circular stickers with three colors (link to what I got). They happened to be in neon pink, green, and orange. 

I then used Google Docs to create a spreadsheet with three columns - one for each floor - and assigned each floor a color from the sticker pack. The main floor is pink, the 2nd floor orange, and the basement green. 

Under the main floor heading, I then listed each room that was on that floor and assigned it its own color. I don't in ANY way expect the movers to memorize this list - they'll mostly be going off the name of the room - but it will help with packing (put all the gray labeled boxes together) and verification (why is there a pink label mixed in with all those blue labels?). And each room will have a sheet of paper on the doorway that matches the assigned color, to act as a double-check (whoops, this must be bedroom 1 and not bedroom 2!).  I tried to make sure that none of the colors on a floor could be mistaken for each other - hence three blues, but none of them are on the same floor. 

Each box will get a "main" label, that looks like this - the dot being a sticker indicating which floor it goes on, with notations for which side goes up, whether it's fragile/heavy, what room it goes in, what's in the box, and the box number (mostly for my internal tracking system - I have a spreadsheet listing each box and what is in it). These are printed 2 per 8.5x11 sheet using these blank labels.

Then four other sides of the box will each get a dot sticker and a rectangular sticker indicating where it goes.

I also made some "fragile" and "heavy" stickers to slap on the boxes as well, so we aren't just relying on the main sticker to alert the movers.

So that's the plan - now we'll see it in action and see if it works as well as I hope it does.

(Yes! The moving label sticker pack is available on Etsy!)