One of the major upsides to being an orderly person is that packing does not take as much mental effort. Sure, there’s a bunch of stuff I have to figure out if I want to keep it or throw it away, but I don’t really need to organize my stuff. It’s already very organized and I’m just going to be moving it from where it is to a series of boxes and then back out somewhere that at least sort of matches where it currently is. Books will still be on shelves. Games and puzzles will still probably be in a closet somewhere. It’s not like i’m going to change how my books are sorted. Everything that needs to get packed together is already together. Everything that hasn’t moved from where it sits in my closet in the three years I’ve lived in my current apartment is automatically marked for “keep or toss” assessment. I’ve still got all my old boxes, I haven’t added to my collections much (thanks to the austerity I’ve observed over the past three years), and now all I’ve got to do is slowly, carefully pack it all up and set it to the side to be eventually deposited in whatever room winds up being my library/living room/office space.

I still have to figure most of that out, unfortunately. I have a floor plan and I’ve got some basic ideas for where it will all go, but I’m going down in size with this apartment change and I already feel a bit uncomfortably packed in already. I will also now have two levels and no single space as big as my current living room, so I’m going to need to get creative. Or figure out some way to do a non-traditional setup of an apartment with a partial second floor. Maybe my living room stuff goes in what is usually described as the “master bedroom” area so that I can tuck my PC into the walk-in closet and have it all close together so future streaming stuff doesn’t require moving consoles around. That said, being able to put my PC near my router is going to be very important, so that might dictate where my computer and entertainment systems go.

I doubt I’d put my bedroom stuff in the main living area, since there’s too many windows there for me to get quality sleep, but there’s still also a bedroom with a door and everything below the “master bedroom” area on the apartment’s second floor. I could make that my bedroom, since I am technically already doing that in my current apartment (using the smaller bedroom as a bedroom and the larger one as an office and gaming space). That would mean either my table or my massive couch have to go upstairs, though, and that’s a lot of ask of the friends who are helping me move. Both are managable, either because they’re fairly light for their size (the couch) or because they come apart into very manageable pieces (the table), but it’s still a lot to handle going up a flight of stairs and over a low half-wall. Plus, keeping my bedroom on the second floor means I am further away from anyone else’s noise other than the single apartment that upper area shares a wall with.

I’ve got a day set aside for planning and painting, so hopefully I’ll be able to figure this all out beforehand and not spend time moving things once they’ve been placed into my new apartment. It would be great to go in with a plan, so stuff can just get put down and I can start getting set up (or someone else can start setting things up) as the move is happening. It would be really cool to go to sleep the night of my move in a mostly settled apartment. I doubt it’ll happen, because that’s a lot of work, but it would still be pretty cool.

I just hope I’ve got enough people and that the move across my apartment complex isn’t too taxing. I’ve had most of my junk on the first floor for the past six years and while the stairwells in my new apartment are spacious enough that I’m not super worried about getting my couch up them, I do know that hauling things up stairs after carrying then a few hundred feet to a new building is going to be more taxing than moving them into a truck and then out of the truck thirty to sixty minutes later. This move is going to be a bit more laborious than most of my past moves and hiring movers to help is, unfortunately, out of the question. They’re too dang expensive, even considering I don’t need a truck, just labor. You’d think you’d get a discount for that, but no. I was still going to be paying full price.