An impending move has gotten me thinking about how many of us move house every year and how ill-prepared most of us are to do it.

Moving is, for the most part, a big fat pain in the rump. However, you can make it less of a pain, if you are even semi-organized and think ahead. These are the Femme Fairy Godmother’s Rules for Moving.

1. Find some way to organize all of your moving stuff. I have a plastic 9 x 12 envelope that I have all my stuff in. By stuff I mean: notes on the apartments I’ve looked at and phone numbers of those I plan to call, things I’ve pulled out of magazines or catalogs, lists of various things that I think I’m going to need when I get there, etc. Also, a Moving To Do List that is about six miles long and involves paying (not so) vast sums of money to people (who are younger than I) to do the actual physical labor of moving me. Also, a note to ask them to put together that gas grill that I got for Christmas in 2007 and which a relatively unmentionable (because I can’t seem to do so without also mentioning that she has never in all of her 40 years of existence said one freaking word that wasn’t a lie, but that’s another story) ex of mine couldn’t put together, nor could my roommate nor could I. Not that I actually tried because, really, what are butch girlfriends for but putting stuff together?

2. Start packing early. You can buy boxes, but if you’re going to do that, then I’d recommend buying those Rubbermaid tubs because then you can store stuff in them. Aside from that, I’ve found that canteloupe boxes are great for many things and banana boxes for others. You can get fruit boxes from your local grocery store.

3. Use this time to take a boat load of stuff to the Goodwill. (But, please, swear to me on your favorite mascara or power tool, that you will never, ever in a million years take anything to the utterly-not-gay-friendly Salvation Army. Please. If you ignore my advice, then, to quote a country song from more than a decade ago, “Don’t tell my heart, my achy breaky heart.”) There is no point to moving things you haven’t used for the last however-many-years you’ve lived in this place you are now. Unless, of course, there’s a good reason, like you got a grill for Christmas and can’t get it put together.

4. You could also sell stuff on ebay or Craig’s list or freecycle it. If you haven’t discovered freecycle, now is the time. You don’t get any money for your stuff, but you get to unload it and someone else is generally pretty thrilled to have it.

5. If you are using boxes, not Rubbermaid bins, then get a boatload of the kind of mailing labels you can run through your printer (the big ones,like 2×4) and print the various rooms that each box will go into. Put a label on all 4 sides of the box, which seems like overkill until you spend a great deal of time moving boxes that say “Kitchen” but on the top only and inexplicably were put in the BASEMENT.) For example, all of the boxes containing kitchen stuff should say Kitchen, all the stuff for the bedroom should say Bedroom. If you have more than one bedroom, then label accordingly. I find it helpful to also label each room but probably you want to put that on a piece of paper and tape it to the door so you can remove it. Those labels can be tricky to remove from wood. If you’re using bins, then you can do the same thing but the labels don’t stick as well. You can use magic marker to write the room on the bin but then you have to deal with that. Probably better to give each room a number and just write the number on the bin.

6. If you are asking your friends to help you move, then be prepared. Be ready when they show up, everything packed and in boxes. Do not ask your friends to move your clothes in garbage bags or various shopping bags. If you do that, it’s your own fault if things get ruined.

7. Also, for a Friends Move, be prepared with lots of drinks (water, soda, etc) and snacks. Plan to buy pizza and adult beverages (assuming you’re old enough) for dinner, along with having paper plates, napkins and plastic silverware. This is the one time I will not give you a hard time about using disposables.

8. Make sure to pack certain things in your car to take. Things like the linens for your bed, your toiletries, any necessary medications and the dog food (and both the dog food dish and water dish.) Really, you don’t want a pissed off Chihuahua underfoot. If you have electronics that are delicate, you’re better off dealing with them yourself. If you just spent more than $2,000 on a LCD HDTV, do you really want to trust anyone else to care for it? You don’t. The same for your laptop, your digital camera or anything else you will completely freak out about if you can’t find it or it gets broken.

9. Take pictures! Take pictures of the place before you move in, take pictures of your pals moving you in, take pictures all along the way. It’s fun. And you’ll be glad you did.10. If you google “moving advice”, there are literally 27,000,000 results. Probably most of them are stupid. If you need more moving advice than my Top Ten, then you could ask me to write some more. Or, if you need them more quickly than that, I recommend that you go over to OrganizedHome.com and read their exhaustive bit of info. You’ll recognize some of it since I have been an OrganizedHome fan for years. It’s more geared towards your basic hetero family but it’ll work for you, too.