So today I discovered Pendaflex ‘project sorters,’ and today my life changed forever. I am obsessed with them! They are a visually pleasing, file-folder like organization tool with color-colored tabs on the front, and see-through front and back pockets. They make doing a project so fun, and a lot easier.My boyfriend and I are moving into a new building in a new and muchhhh cooler part of town {thank you Jesus Christ in heaven} in exactly three weeks, and I needed everything to be organized in one place. This is what I did, and what you can do too the next time you move:
1st thing first: I printed off a simple grid “Moving To-Do Checklist” for the front, to keep track of all the tasks associated with moving. I highlighted stages: Pre-Move, Moving, Utilities, and Mail.
Pre-Move is things like:
- Buy boxes, packing tape, sharpie
- IKEA trip
- Order couch for delivery on date of move-in
- Selling anything?, i.e.- go through stuff and figure out what is being packed, versus sold or thrown out, etc.
- Pick moving company and make reservation
Move is things like:
- Reserve loading dock at current place
- Reserve loading dock at new place
- Figure out dimensions of freight elevator and doorways at new place
Reserving the loading docks when moving is suuuuuper crucial, IF you live in an apartment building and/or condo that is. Obviously houses and townhouses with front-door entry into the units don’t apply. But if this isn’t a task on your to-do list, you forget to do it and then 3 days before you move out, you call to reserve it and it’s already full and you can’t do a single thing. If you don’t have loading dock access for couches, beds, etc., you basically can’t move. It can really screw you over.
Utilities is things like:
- Cancel electric/gas/cable at current place
- Set up new service or transfer service to new place
Mail–>Change of Address, lists all the places I need to contact about my new address. Things to consider/remember are:
- Officially at the post office
- Banks
- Doctors’ Offices
- Magazine subscriptions
- College
- Loan Lenders {if you have student loans}
These days everyone does paperless everything, but people still get mail, so just look through your mail and think about where you are sent mail from, and make sure they have the new address because you DON’T want any correspondences from your bank getting sent to a new person living in your old place.
On the checklist, put contacts and phone numbers for everything you can think of– the moving company, the leasing office at your new place {or if you are not renting, whoever is in charge…condo/homeowner’s association, whatever}. This mostly applies to renting though.
So that’s the checklist.
Then, I used a label-maker to print labels for the big ticket items.
- Floor Plan
- IKEA List
- Paint
- Rugs
- Room Inspiration
- Lighting
- Art
- Decor
- Textiles
- Furniture
Like SO: 
TAB1: The floor plan to your place governs pretty much everything, so I put it as the first tab. You refer to this GILLIONS of times throughout the pre-move and initial phases, when considering dimensions of furniture, what will fit, where it will go, etc. Even when figuring how much paint to buy, you need to know how tall/long the walls are, etc. I had our leasing people email me an electronic copy of it, and I printed off three clean copies. I kept two clean, and decorated one with my not-to-scale sketch of what will go where. See my outline of the cow’s hide? hahaaha that’s my favorite part. And the only part that looks good in this drawing. But it all makes sense to me. 
TAB2– “IKEA List.” 
My boyfriend and I are broke. We are the kind of broke that your parents talk about being, when they were law students living off of loan money and Ramen and lived in a shoebox sized apartment on top of each other in New York, and worked 3 jobs and donated blood to earn extra cash. We sat down the other night and went through all of our finances {it was really fun} and determined that between all of the bills we have to pay, i.e. FIXED expenses, things like credit cards, loans, car payments, insurance, gas money, move-out costs [like the fee we have to pay our apartment for them to re-clean it before the next person moves in, etc.], that after all that, we have exactly– EXACTLY– $400.00 for the move. We don’t have furniture………………………The things I OWN include things like side tables, lamps, one console table {that I’m selling because it won’t fit in the new place}, shelves, etc., but the TWO things that a person needs in a place are: a couch, and a coffee table. Those are the two things we don’t have.
Sidenote– Have you ever moved into a new place? The first time I ever moved into a new places was last year, when I moved into the place I am currently living in as I type this blog post, and also the place I will be moving out of in 3 weeks. It was my first lease, and my first experience walking into a completely empty room. While at Dartmouth, I lived in the dorms all 4 years and dorms come furnished so I never learned what you NEED when moving in to a new, empty, residence. Well friends, when you move into a new place for the first time, you notice within two hours—two hours– the things you didn’t realize you need, and those things are: A shower curtain, a trash can, paper towels, toilet paper, and scissors. They are things you would never think about before your first move, but after your first move, TWO HOURS into the new place, you’re like….”oh shit…..this isn’t a hotel. there is quite literally NOTHING here.” You realize, that there is nowhere to throw anything out. That you went to go pee, and there are no paper products. You start to unpack things, and have no scissors to open anything. You wash your hands, and can’t dry them. You need to take a shower from all the dirty moving and unpacking, and you realize you are standing naked in a tub with no shower curtain…and you don’t know where the towels are. It’s just something that I personally didn’t think of. I remember walking into our place for the very first time, and going to the bathroom and realizing……..oh….right….there is N-O-T-H-I-N-G here. I made a list right then and there, of the 5 things that are like, a mover’s emergency stash. You have to have those things on hand immediately.
But THEN, there was a realization that took a bit longer than 2 hours. Our couch wasn’t being delivered for a few days, and we hadn’t yet picked out a coffee table, and by 10 pm that first day of being in your new places without those two things, you’re like “uhhh okay joke’s over…get me a fucking coffee table and couch NOW.” There is nowhere to do anything without those two things. while a person can live without MANYMANYMANYMANYMANYMANYMANY things, including ALL DECOR, book shelves, accent chairs, curtains, etc., there are two things a person needs BEFORE they even move in, and those two things are: COUCH. COFFEE TABLE. That’s it. Those are ESSENTIAL.Your life will be miserable until you have a couch and coffee table.
So we have 400 dollars to get a couch, coffee table, buy packing materials, hire movers, etc. HAHAH Good luck, US. #Nothappening. NEEDLESS TO SAY, allllllllllllllll of this was to get to my point that IKEA is literally the only place we are looking/going for at least 2 months. There is not a SINGLE place that can beat IKEA’s prices. Their “Lack” coffee table is $39.99, and their Ektorp couch {which is very comfortable, long, and has 3 cushions as opposed to two} is $399. 399 dollars and is hands down THE cheapest couch we’ve come across, especially for one that is aesthetically pleasing and comfortable. Unless we buy….like, some SUPER ghetto couch off Craig’s List or Goodwill, but that’s ghetto. I’m cool with refurbishing side tables and chairs from places like that, but your COUCH– no thank you. There are a few other things we are aiming to get at IKEA- like the UBIQUITOUS “Expedit” grid bookshelf, some knives {we don’t own any and they’re $4.99 at IKEA}, a cow’s hide {if there aren’t cheaper ones on EBAY or something of the like}, and some other things, and at IKEA.com, you can select everything you want, and it will look up the numbers and availability at the store location of your choosing, and then you print it out and take it with you for easy shopping. SOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO, our IKEA List has its own tab, because we are going to be living off of our IKEA shopping list for like the first 4 months of being in our new place. With each new paycheck, a new thing can be bought because that is how life is when you are 25 and hustling.
For the rest of the tabs, I simply printed images fit to full-sized 8 1/2 by 11 printer paper, in full color. These are good to have on hand because a.) they remind you of your ultimate vision, so you don’t get carried away. And b.) So you show people at the stores where you go. “I am looking for a rug like this.” Etc.
Tab3– PAINT. Paint colors are crucial. I don’t want us to go too long without painting, because then you just get lazy and like 6 months pass and your walls are still eggshell white. #NO. I have MASSIVE folders of images I’ve saved for years, so I printed out the images of painted walls I have that caught my eye in various editorials from magazines or Apartment Therapy or blogs or whatever. They go in the “paint” tab so that when we walk into Benjamin Moore or wherever, we can just look for paint chips to match the pictures, or show the pictures to staff and say “we’re looking for a green like THIS.”As we start collecting paint chips and going through that whole process, they will be stored in this tab too.
Tab4– RUGS. Ditto on the rugs. We need a cow’s hide, a Moroccon-esque kilim rug, a graphic modern black-and-white striped rug, and a flokati.
Tab5–Room Inspiration. Here, I printed out images of actual ROOMS that I like, instead of individual things like “rugs” “lamps” and “art pieces.” The rooms are ENTIRE rooms whose look I like.
TAB 6–Lighting.
Tab 8– DECOR
Tab 9– TEXTILES
TAB 10– The ACTUAL furniture. This is last because we won’t be able to afford the good stuff for awhile. The IKEA Ektorp $399 sofa is temporary…ultimately my dream couch is the blue velvet sofa from Ethan Allen that you may have seen on other blogs. It’s a dream couch!
At the very back of the binder, I have the full collage I made of the overall design look for the house.
I also made a list of ‘resources’ if you will, for home stuff, even though it’s IKEA in the short term. I did this because I sometimes forget about places, like Home Goods when I’m on the hunt for something, so I spend all day looking for a lamp and give up and go home and then remember I didn’t go to Home Goods because I’d forgotten it existed. 
And for the front of the binder, I printed out calendar months for the last months of 2011. It’s just nice to have things laid out visually, so if you go into a store and ask about delivery or whatever, you can look at your calendar and see how it fits into things. I KNOW people have phones, but I like being able to hold things and touch them and write on them. 
So that’s my moving binder. It was SO easy to make. Pendaflex’s are 11 dollars at Staples. The checklist was made using grid boxes in Microsoft Word. A simple label maker made the labels for the tabs. And then I printed all of the images. Literally all you do is right-click to save an image to your desktop, then open it and click file–>print, or “Control+P”, and whether you have a PC or a MAC, it should just automatically print the image to the size of the paper. It’s legit. I CAN’T tell you how obsessed I am with this binder. Every time I see it, I just want to make out with it. It’s just makes me want to wake up and start slaying life. Just owning our move. I’m normally not THIS organized. Without Pendaflex project sorter, all of these things would have been in ten different places, but this little magical part-file folder part-binder gave me a place to put it all together, in a very visually satisfying way. #obsessssedwithPendaflex. #notsponosoredbyPendaflex. #wouldbeweirdifIwas.
An empty pendaflex:
You also don’t have to use labels and can instead used colored sharpies to fill in the tabs. Alright good night. It’s 2 AM on Friday night and I’m still up posting about this.
