Freecycle is a fine thing if you’re moving. It’s not just a good way to get rid of stuff that no way are you going to sell. (Plus, who has yard sale in Seattle in March?) It’s also a good way to get boxes. I can almost guarantee that someone in your neighborhood has just moved and empty boxes are piling up about the place. The newly moved and exhausted resident knows they ought to recycle those boxes, but they are too busy finding where the power cord to their speakers has gone or buying shelf paper or they’re unable to leave the apartment because for the life of them they can not find the key.
When you use someone else’s boxes, they come marked with all kinds of information that allows you to make up fiction about the lives of their owner. My first batch of boxes were covered with shipping labels from Wales. “Books,” said the nice woman who helped me get them down the stairs. “We have too many books. We couldn’t make ourselves get rid of them.” Lots of her boxes were already second hand, used to ship things to the Holiday Inn or to hold photocopies of middle school handouts.
The second batch came from my friends who have just moved. They had the obscene luxury of using a mover so the boxes that came from them were sturdy, usefully printed with forms that allow you to identify the contents, and all the same size. You think this isn’t an issue but as I packed my kitchen in boxes labeled “VC/Books” and “Fragile! Bake Ware”, I realized that the handy thing about same size boxes is they stack easily. I envy one other thing about having movers: it’s that you can fill the big boxes with the ever present books and someone else will move them. I am thinking smaller and filling little boxes with books because the big boxes are just too damn heavy when filled with California Painters, travel atlases, the Himalaya Photographs, etc… I did make a tactical error and filled a larger box with cookbooks, but I’ll line up a strapping lad or two for that.
The batch I’m working on now is a random collection of sizes and shapes with rather detailed labeling. Some of them are from purchases – they came from a home with a new roasting pan, an HP color printer, an iMac. But there’s also a lot of medical supply boxes making me wonder what the owners do for their day jobs. Doctors, maybe? Research scientists? Who knows. What I do know is that they, too, moved a lot of books and a number of items that are called out in detail. Tall fish glasses and large fruit bowls and a gravy boat. These folks are different than me – I just scribbled “Tableware/FRAGILE”on the box and left it at that – now I have no idea which box contains the wine glasses and which contains the mixing bowls. It amuses me to think of those nice people in a frenzy of unpacking and saying “Honey! Honey! Can you bring me the box with the gravy boat in it?”
I am trying to label my boxes neatly and consistently so it’s possible to identify the contents in spite of the heavily labeled past each box bears. A box that says “Blender Attachments” doesn’t contain blender parts at all, it holds, you guessed it, books .The box says so in block letters, neatly marked out with a Sharpie. To make it clear that this is my label, not the previous owner’s handiwork, I have carefully drawn a box around my writing. Books, it says, with a box around it. Glass, with a box around it. Jam (yes, jam) with a box around it. Soon we’ll move all the boxes out of this box to the new box across town. And I’ll list all the boxes on Freecycle. “Moving boxes, West Seattle, come and get ’em.”
We have informal “freecycling” in my neighborhood: you put out things that you don’t want but that aren’t garbage (outgrown or out of fashion clothes in particular, but also small furniture and of course boxes) next to or on top of the garbage cans on garbage night. The next morning, they’re always gone. It kind of blows my mind, but it always works. I think some people collect stuff that way and then sell it, but I feel good about that, too.
Freecycle rocks. Love it.
I’d never thought of Freecycle as a resource for boxes–good idea!
So, yeah, I move a lot, being a navy spouse, and I have to say, I don’t miss the self-move (I did many, many of them before the husband came along). But, if it makes you feel any better, although it is scandalously decadent to watch the moving people come to your house and pack and move all of your stuff, I have never had more things get broken than I did during our first moving company move. It was a sad, sad day.
I will make sure I share the wealth by giving my fabulous moving company boxes to a good home after the move we have this month! Thanks for the tip.