How To Move In to Your Student Home Without The Stress
Your first real experience of freedom and independence, moving into a student home is an exciting time. At least, it is once you have overcome the stress of actually moving in. After all, transporting everything you need to your student home is a frustrating process that can take a lot of time and more than a little hard work.
Moving in is especially difficult if you are relocating to a university that is several hours away. Students who are close to their family home might be able to transfer their items over several trips, for example, and won’t be affected if they leave something behind. However, if you are coming from a long distance away, you need to be sure that everything you require is packed. You don’t want to have to make repeat journeys because you forgot an all-important cable.
Nevertheless, whether you are coming from 30 minutes down the road or 300 miles away, moving into your first student home is rarely easy. There is the exhausting labour of carrying boxes up many flights of stairs, the nuisance of misplacing important items you cannot find, and the never-ending back-and-forth journeys to the car to unpack everything you need.
Here are a few ways you can make it easier:
Colour code boxes by function
When people are packing boxes to move into their student home, many choose to do so in a way that ensures every centimetre of space is used in a box. A laptop might get shoved into one box where there is a sliver of space remaining, while its cable may be forced into another where there’s enough room to fit it in. However, while this method might reduce the amount of boxes you are taking, it makes unpacking far more complicated as each box will contain an assortment of items pertaining to different areas of your student home. The same box could be filled with kitchenware, bathroom products and electronics, for example.
Moving in is ultimately much faster if you pack the boxes by function. For instance, ensure that everything you plan to use in your bathroom is in one box while everything that is for your kitchen is in another. You should then colour co-ordinate each box so you know exactly where each one is intended to go. Removal Reviews has a useful guide to follow to make sure the moving in process goes smoothly.
Doing this guarantees you won’t be rooting through dozens of boxes at a time, makes it easier to check you have not left anything behind, and lessens the chances of you losing certain items as you know which box they should be in.
Efficient packing saves space
Although one of the disadvantages of using a colour coded system is that you might need more boxes, you can cut back on the amount of packing you do by being more efficient in how you go about it. For example, a number of the items you are taking with you to a student home might be a good substitute for bubble wrap, such as kitchen towels. Therefore, instead of wasting precious space by wrapping glasses and mugs in bubble wrap, you could secure them in the cloths instead. This way, you will have more space for your important items and hopefully require fewer boxes as a result.
Getting boxes to your student home
By far the most stress-inducing task when you are moving into your student home is actually getting the items there. Getting them from the vehicle to their intended room is no simple feat – particularly if you are carrying boxes with heavy items such as television screens. At best, you will be exhausted by the time you finally manage to get them to your room. At worst, you could injure yourself by pulling a muscle.
Moving boxes from your vehicle is much easier if you invest in a foldable sack truck. These are moveable metal structures that allow you to wheel boxes. They are commonly seen in warehouses. A sack truck is designed to ease the physical stress of carrying heavy items. It is one of the products recommended by the government’s Health and Safety Executive for reducing workplace injuries. It is, however, just as useful for moving into a new home safely. Best of all, because sack trucks can carry several boxes at a time, they can also significantly reduce the time it would normally take to move into your student home.