Confessions of A Cardboard Box Junkie

We are on our 9th move. Hopefully this will be the grand finale. But that’s what I said about the last one, and even the one before that. Go figure. It’s never over until you expire, I guess.

I woke up this morning to a house full of boxes.
I am temporarily obsessed with boxes because we have to put all our stuff in them over the next three weeks and then one day later start taking all our stuff out of them again, 75 miles away.
Filling the boxes is something that requires a certain amount of precision, at least if you are as anal about it as I am.

Supermarket Boxes

I get my supermarket boxes at No Frills, which is the only supermarket chain in my area that actually has bins for them behind their cash registers.
Now these boxes are supposed to be for people to put their groceries in. But I don’t give a damn about them. I’m a box junkie and my needs come first.

There are two kinds of supermarket boxes I like the best. There are the small boxes, the ones that originally held 6 big bottles of fabric softener or household cleaning stuff etc.
These boxes are made of stronger cardboard and are good for books.
We have a lot of books. I’m not sure why we have so damn many books. My wife reads everything on her iPad and I’m a paperback guy. Yet we have close to 500 really freaking heavy coffee table books that go with us everywhere.
The other supermarket boxes I like are the ones that are designed for paper towels, toilet paper etc. These boxes are good for clothes, blankets and pillows and can be jammed in between stuff in the mover’s truck because they’re soft.
Like books, I’m not sure why we have so damn many pillows either. I don’t even sleep on a pillow, but a 6 inch cylinder of foam, like in Star Trek.

The Imagination Is Dead

When the house was being staged for sale, the stager brought in about two dozen pillows and asked us to take our pillows to the storage locker along with our dining room chairs, occasional chairs and most of the art we had hanging on the walls. which she replaced.
So I needed to cop some boxes for all of those things as well.
The stager, who is a very nice lady, was aiming to make our house look as generic as possible.
There was a time when you could show people around and just ask them to imagine what it would look like with their stuff in it. And they could do that.
But for some reason, that set of brain cells no longer exists in most people.
I guess it’s a side effect of the dumbing down of society that I occasionally write about.

Street Boxes

When you are in box junkie mode, any source will do. Every night at 9:00 or after we head out and cruise the Danforth and then Queen Street looking for boxes that have been put out for recycling.
Every once in a while you will find some damn fine boxes in front of a small apartment. These are the remnants of a recent move. I found about 20 of those the other night. Last night, I found about 25 toy boxes in front of Mastermind on Queen Street. So my addiction is under control for the moment.
But you go through these boxes fast. Like cheap heroin.

The Holy Grail of Boxes

If I could only have one kind of box (besides the big ones), it would definitely be the boxes you get at fruit and vegetable stores. These are the boxes that once contained oranges, lemons or grapefruit.
These are two piece boxes. The bottom piece is for your stuff. The top piece fits right over the bottom piece, thus creating a cardboard Fort Knox for whatever is inside. These boxes are also easy to carry because they are smallish and they stack like a dream.

The 8 Beatitudes Of Boxes and Boxing

These will be especially useful for all you Americans who are now contemplating their migration to the Great White North.
1. Pack the books first. It’s the biggest pain in the ass part of the moving process.
2. Make sure you fill the boxes so they stack. The movers love that.

3. Put all the stuff you are going to need for the first night or two in a big suitcase.
4. Rent a van to move all your TV and computer stuff, your plants and anything that will break easily. Let the movers deal with the rest.
5. Put all your boxes in one place close to the door so the movers can put them in their truck first.
6. Always make sure that whatever you put in a box fits snugly and allows you to close the box completely. Not doing so is the best way to lose stuff or have it smushed by the movers.
7. Always smell the boxes you take and look for evidence that something has rotted in them. You don’t want those boxes.
8. Avoid buying boxes at all cost. Most of the ones that the moving and storage places sell are crap.

I could tell you a lot more about these boxes, but I am burning daylight here and I need about thirty or so more before I have enough.

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