Joining you all in the Ikea Bag Buy Bonanza. Sent a pack of 4 (with zippers) to the college kid. Sent 2 zippered and two open topped (for moving grocery items) to the kid who is moving to a new apartment this summer. She has a big-girl job, so if they’re great, she can buy more herself!
Thanks everybody for alerting me that I’d ordered the wrong ones. I’ve now ordered the XL zippered storage bags.
For my son, who is notoriously last minute, I imagine him stuffing all his dirty stuff in a box and storing it all summer in the heat. Which is why we have always hauled everything home and then hauled it back up to school. This is his second year living in a fraternity house and they let them store stuff in the basement, so he stores his mattress, etc… there. I didn’t go down there, but my husband said it was disgusting.
We have friends here. They rent a storage unit here year round. In the fall, they move all of their patio furniture, and the like into the storage unit. In April, they put the patio stuff back outside…and move…Tada…all,of the boxes and bags of stuff their kids bring home into the storage unit. It is a self storage that coats them about $90 a month.
Then my 3000 miles away kid stored for the summer, she shared a storage unit with 3 other students. I think it cost us about $100 for the summer. Well worth it.
I wish…wish…I had done that with the kid who was closer to home.
First…I would not have had to look at the stuff in my living room all summer long…and second…all of the packing and moving would have been my kid’s issue
Thanks to all for the advice! The move-out went smoothly. The Ikea zippered bags were a lifesaver!
With 4 people working on the move it took us just 2 hours–we were very pleasantly surprised.
Some of the other students on the floor were taking carloads of stuff into storage, and we saw a couple of moving vans too.
Now we have to move the bagloads of stuff from living room to laundry room, storage attic etc–but meanwhile we’re still recovering from all of the activities of the week and weekend.
Make sure they pack before you get there! That is all I have to say.
Yes, packing it all up and bringing it home is just part of it, it will all have to be sorted and put away, washed, stored gor next year.
After moving D out on Saturday, I took Monday off to help with the sorting that I wish had occurred before I got there (clothes that shrunk in the too-hot dorm dryers; multiple plastic cups from campus events and local bars; toiletry and detergent bottles that are 90% empty; umpteen t-shirts–some unwearable except as PJs, and you don’t need 15 of those–etc.) She did have a reasonable amount packed up, so the actual transporting of items out of her room and into the car wasn’t that bad–but there is still much organizing to do. Well, hopefully she’ll get better at it each year.
I’m a freshman student who just moved out so I thought finding this thread was pretty appropriate. Personally, I packed all my stuff before my dad picked me up. It took two trips for us to bring all my stuff to the car (my school has carts they let you take out.) It was about 30 minutes. I basically spent all of finals week studying and taking short packing breaks in between. (It wasn’t as stressful as it sounds!) My biggest tip for move out is making sure that your kids pack ahead of time! Some people on my floor didn’t even think about packing until their parents arrived. At my school you sign up for a “check out” time with your R.A. so I know it was kind of stressful for them. While everything doesn’t have to be packed away, starting on small items can really help to make things less stressful.
(It should be noted that my school is about two hours away from my home and my parents have a Chevy Traverse, so we have a lot of space.)
D and I got back last Saturday after her dorm move out and I thought I’d report back. First, the IKEA zippered bags were fantastic and I highly recommend them, especially for stuff like clothes and bedding. Second, my D had way way way too much stuff (counting not just what she brought out in August 2015 and but also what she accumulated while there). We live in driving distance (5-1/2 hours) so that meant that she didn’t have the forced discipline of weighing her luggage. I noticed several students in the hallways taking turns weighing their luggage and obviously getting rid of stuff to get it down to 50 lbs. Also she had not really done much packing/storing ahead of time (she had just managed to pack and store one bag). It didn’t really take that long to pack her stuff up but it was just too much stuff. We had let her take her car to school for the second semester but it’s a small car and she would never have fit everything (counting her rat cage and rat accessories) if we hadn’t had two cars to manage. She swears that she’s going to pack much lighter for sophomore year, and plan ahead for move out by storing more during finals week. Hopefully she remembers that promise in August 2016 and May 2017.