Moving a shop - a couple tips

[Todd Burch]

I sold my house back at the end of April and moved everything to storage. I moved some tools myself, and let the movers move the bulk of the boxes, some cabinets and odd-ball shaped stuff.

I ended up with 1 big unit for the house (packed floor to ceiling by the movers) and 3 (count them, three) units, all 10X20, for shop stuff. $70 + $70 + $250 a month.

Well, I just bought all this stuff from an auction recently, and was going to have rent yet another $70/month 10X20 unit. After I unloaded just a few pieces, the storage unit mgr walked over to chat, and I asked "what's that really big unit over there for?". She said she used to run a Fence business out of it, and it was available to rent. I asked how big and how much. She said 25X40, for $250 a month. I said "sold!".

So, I've been moving everything into the one big unit. I should finish up tonight. The one thing I have learned is that pallets and stretch wrap (18" variety) are my friend. When I moved originally, I had machines w/o wheels on pallets, and then loose boxes. However, to consolidate everything into this one big unit, it was faster to stack boxes on pallets and then shrink wrap those puppies and move them with the pallet jack. SO much faster.

Some of these pallets of boxes I'm stacking 6+ feet high. I've had a couple boxes crush, since they weren't full to the top. I solved this issue by stacking a layer or two of boxes, depending, and then adding a layer of scrap MDF or hardboard as a solid layer-divider before adding more boxes on top. Seems to be working great so far.

When it comes time to move out of the storage unit and into the shop, the truck loading/unload should go pretty fast.

Todd

[Anthony Whitesell]

Unfortunately you are already very far along for this advice, but I would have suggested to find out what types of boxes you can get free and a lot of. The fewer type of boxes you have the easier they are to organize and stack. Around here you can get banana boxes fairly readily. They tend to have an opening in the bottom that is easily covered, and as long as you don't put a small heavy item in the center they work great. I find you can fill them heavier than you can lift (ie., don't use them for books).

[Todd Burch]

I needed so many boxes, finding all the same size wasn't an option, so I bought boxes. Probably spent $600 on them.

Another tip... if you can't use all the same boxes, (and who can?), get boxes that are the same height, but different widths and lengths, but hopefully the widths and/or lengths are multiples of, say, 3", 4" or 6".

[Brian Backner]

Not that you need them now, but if anyone else needs a LOT of boxes, I'd consider buying them online from one of the really big box companies. Much cheaper than sourcing locally and available in an unbelievable number of sizes and thicknesses. Try ULine first (no affiliation):

http://www.uline.com/

Also, think about where some of your friends might work. One buddy of mine used to work at a local hospital in maintenance. I went in to see him one night at work and looked at all of the various supplies that was shipped in on a routine basis. One of the more common boxes was 9x15x24" and contained paper towels - they were heavy walled and not too large. I asked him to save up a month's worth of them as a test. That worked out to over 125 boxes per month! For a case of beer per month, he and his crew would even break them apart and fold them flat for me. I ended up using 424 boxes by actual count - each box was labeled with a number, and the contents were recorded in a log book so it would be easier to find something (if I were to do this today, I'd type everything into a searchable spread sheet or database on my laptop). Another thing I did was to get rolls of 12 different colors of 2" wide tape. I then color coded each box and each room in the house - so red boxes went into the "red" room and so on. It took the movers a few minutes to adjust to it, but it ended up saving us a LOT of time later on. Something to consider here is to make sure you label and put a square of tape on ALL six sides of every box so you can tell what it is no matter how oriented when it's on the bottom of a large stack of similar boxes.

Brian
Taxachusetts

[Michael W. Clark]

Something to consider here is to make sure you label and put a square of tape on ALL six sides of every box so you can tell what it is no matter how oriented when it's on the bottom of a large stack of similar boxes.

Absolutely, we almost "lost" a box of baby clothes in a move because the old label was facing out, but the "re-label" was facing inward. We finally found it, but took waaay too much time.