Moving house the zero-waste way

Our new home.

We have moved!

Over Easter weekend we bundled all our belongings into cars and a large trailer and drove them 20 minutes to our new house. It's the first time we've made an inner-city move, so we did the work ourselves without hiring a professional moving company.

The move went much smoother than I had anticipated, thanks in huge part to family and friends who worked incredibly hard.

I was conscious of trying to keep the move as waste-free as possible, and today am sharing the strategies I used in case you're considering your own move at some point.

• Banana boxes - Every couple of days leading up to the move, I popped down to the local supermarket and collected all its empty banana boxes. These boxes were durable and easy to carry with their built in handles. They were also easy to recycle after the move.

• Large plastic storage boxes - we already own a stack of large plastic storage boxes, so I shifted toys and kitchenware in them. They proved to be strong and easy to stack in the car. Since we settled on our house the day before we had help moving our large furniture, I was able to reuse the same five plastic storage boxes a few times to shift kitchen items to our new house and get most of the kitchen unpacked before everything else arrived. 

• Protective wrapping - To wrap items going into the boxes, I used tea towels, hand towels, flannels, rags, socks for glassware, bubble wrap and tissue paper I already had. I had to move all these things anyway, so it made sense to use them to protect my crockery and pictures.

• Sheets on beds - I kept our sheets on the beds to help protect the mattresses during the move.

• Freezer drawers - I used up most of the food in our fridge and freezer in the weeks before the move, but there was still a little bit left, so I bundled all the freezer food together with ice packs in a couple of drawers in the actual freezer and just shifted this food in the freezer. We plugged in the freezer as soon as it arrived at the new place, and everything stayed nice and frozen. We shifted the fridgables in a chilly bin. 

• Decluttering - I mentioned this in my last post, but decluttering really helped the move go smoother as it meant we didn't have as much to move. I spent most of February and March sorting through cupboards, drawers and our garage and was able to donate many, many! carloads of items we no longer need. Our new home is smaller than our last one, so I was highly motivated to get rid of things we were storing 'just-in-case'. Looking around our house now, I see there is still even more I could release for someone else's use. 

And that's it! Pretty simple, but it worked.