There is one thing in life that brings me joy every single time.  That is helping people when they need it.  It really does not matter what I am doing but if I am able to help a friend out then I am glad to do it. This year I have been able to help out many friends and family because moving has been happening left and right.  The housing market has been perfect for selling and buying due to interest rates being the way they are.  So many people have decided to pack up their boxes and change locations.  What I found was that some of the normal ways we move are simply not good and can end up hurting people.  I mean it, I saw a lot of injuries while moving and many things get broken and much of it all came down to storage of the items. 

The average American knows that if you are moving you go to a store and ask for some old moving boxes.  Or you start asking your family for their old boxes when they moved.  Usually, we find enough to move and don’t have to spend a dime on it.  What people don’t realize is that by not spending money on boxes they are costing themselves the risk of injury and also the cost of broken items.  Now, this is not always true, but usually, we find really old boxes and that causes a lot of problems.

I noticed this when I pulled a muscle in my back early in the year.  This was because the box I picked up held.  It was very flimsy and thin.  The box I picked up ended up having some heavy items in it.  The weight shifted and the box started to flex like it was made of rubber.  This caused my weight to shift in a strange way and for my back to be pulled.  Now if this was a once and done sort of thing I would say it was a fluke. But I saw it happen again on the next move.  I also saw the box drop and thousands of dollars of plates get destroyed.  Then it hit me what the issue was.  It was the box.

So I started to search for ways to find good boxes for moving.  I landed on a packaging supplies store and found out all about boxes.  There are thick, thin, heavy and light boxes.  This company made them for lots of big manufacturers and shipping companies.  So I called them up and found out that they also made moving packages.  The packagings supplies store moving packages were about 25 to 30 bucks and they came with heavy-duty moving boxes.  They also came with heavy-duty tape and markers.  I know it sounds silly, but I got really excited.  This was the answer to broken items and pulled muscles.

So when my brother moved the next week I bought one of these packages and sent it to him.  He was a bit shocked, but we had the easiest move of all time and they were more organized.  Instantly I knew I was on to something and decided to do this for each move.  Most people think I am a bit crazy, but they really do enjoy the outcome and to me that brings joy to my life.

This year has been really hard on much of the world.  In fact, the United States has had incredible unemployment and the cost of living has simply gone up.  There are fewer options available and the ability to shop at brick and mortar stores has been drastically limited.  This has led to a change in the way we shop in general.  Our economy has moved from a just in time brick and mortar delivery to eCommerce.  It is really incredible to see this happening and now I am personally seeing consequences that I never thought would happen.  I simply found that my garage was getting filled with boxes.  It started to drive me crazy and my wife was going nuts because we couldn’t even park our car in the garage anymore.

Honestly, we didn’t drive much of anywhere but still, winter is almost here and we needed to clean out the garage of all these eCommerce boxes. The thought was that we should make sure to get rid of them the proper way. I didn’t want to do anything but recycle all of these boxes.  I saw that I was creating up to 10 times more trash than normal per week and that was driving me nuts.  I knew that there had to get disposed of properly and not just dropped in a landfill like all the other packaging supplies.

So instead of trashing all these packaging supplies, I decided to make sure we recycled them properly. For our home, this meant that we were able to use one trashcan in green each week.  That is not a whole lot of space.  But it is the only amount that our local trash company allows and we knew that it was the correct thing to do.  We at first just threw the boxes in but after 3 no more would ever fit.  This was a problem because we ended up using 15 to 20 boxes a week.  I never imaged we would ever have too many, but these wouldn’t fit in the trashcan.  

What we decided to do was to break down the boxes in order to fit them in.  This seems so easy, but I was using my hands and it simply was too much work.  My hands were getting these huge paper cuts and still I didn’t get many boxes in the trashcan.  So I decided to break out the scissors because that makes the most sense.  Well, it turns out that the task was not going to work.  I had to stop after 2 boxes because my hands hurt so bad.  It did make the boxes fit perfectly in the trashcan though.  So another way had to be found.

I decided to go old school with these boxes and use a big knife.  Well, the knife was not big, but it was a fixed bladed knife with a nice comfortable handle.  I knew that if it was a thin knife it wouldn’t be comfortable either.  So I decided to slowly and safely cut the boxes into the correct shapes to fit the trashcan perfectly.  It was a great idea and it even worked.  I was able to cut them all down and fit them in each week.  It takes about 30 minutes a week to do it right and safely. So I hope this helps you.