Moving tips for apartment dwellers

This is my life today:

In honor of moving day, here are my tips for a smooth transition.

Take the time to clean your new place before you move in.  In addition to this just making sense because it's easier to clean without all the furniture in the way, and you have no idea how clean the previous tenants were, this also will help you find problem spots.  Our new apartment complex is fantastic and I have never been handed the keys to such a clean apartment in my life, but I still went through and mopped and wiped everything down.  If I hadn't, I might not have spotted the scratches on the bath tub faucet, the burn mark on the metal stove top or the partially melted dishwasher blade.

Seriously, what were the previous tenants up to that they were able to inflict this damage?

Photograph the problem spots.  Sure you're filling in the move-in checklist provided by the apartment complex, but what if they lose it or you get in a dispute over whether "scratches on floor" included that gouge they want you to pay for or was describing something else?  Take pictures, upload them to your computer, and save them in their own folder with an easy-to-identify title like "Move in pictures of *fill in address.*"  Thanks to technology, there will be date information stored in the data that can help prove your case to your landlord, or God forbid, a court.

Mr. Clean Magic Erasers.  They are amazing.  Our new bathroom floor is that speckled linoleum that doesn't show dirt easily because the pattern is random.  I was scrubbing it with hot water and vinegar and found an area that looked more like dirt than part of the floor, but could not get it to budge.  I wasn't convinced that it wasn't nasty-ness so I attacked it with a Magic Eraser and with minimal coaxing, the dirt started to come up.  Not sure I would qualify the entry to the linen closet in the bathroom as a "high traffic" area but something made the floor there extra cruddy!

Use free boxes from local grocery stores.  For one thing, this saves you money, which is rare when moving.  For another, boxes used to package bananas, tomatoes, and peaches tend to be very sturdy, stack well, and aren't usually large enough to allow you overpack them.  (I love peach boxes for their ability to interlock.)  For a third, you generally have to collect these boxes a few at a time, which means you need to start early.  

By starting to collect boxes early and having empty boxes pile up in your apartment, hopefully it will encourage you to start packing early as well.  Packing early forces you to notice the things you rarely, if ever, use.  Use this opportunity to PURGE:  one of my least favorite things is getting into my new space and then unpacking to find that I just wasted several trips back and forth to the truck to move stuff I don't even want to keep anymore.  Suddenly all my sore muscles are even more exhausted.

Treat it like a trip.  By that I mean, don't pack important things in a box that could get misplaced or even somehow permanently lost, instead keep them in a "carry-on bag."  Examples include documents like your passport or checkbook, small family keepsakes like jewelry, medications you regularly take as well as ones you may need during the move such as ibuprofen, snacks and a water bottle, and a camera for documenting problem spots you may have missed previously.