Moving is a balancing act between discomfort and panic. It's irritating to have boxes everywhere, or to have something you need packed away in a box somewhere. But it's terrifying to look around and see all the things you haven't packed yet.
The solution involves two things, one difficult, the other simple. The hard part is packing things away at just the right time, so you don't spend too much time without access to things you need, but don't wait too long to pack everything up, either. At five weeks out, you pick the low-hanging fruit: boxes you haven't opened since your last move, clothes that one kid has outgrown but the next hasn't grown into yet, and out-of-season seasonal items. The Christmas decorations and holiday plates have now been packed away.
The second part of the solution is to establish a staging area. The idea is to declare some part of your house dedicated to the piling of boxes from this moment forward. The ideal staging area has easy access both to the rest of the house and the place where the moving truck will park - which usually means picking one or the other. For our last move, the staging area was in an unused room that had been carved out of the garage.
For this move, I chose the part of our garage where we were already storing the moving boxes. I sorted the boxes into three piles: recycle (too small or flimsy), particular objects (so the label matches the contents, a minority of the collection), and the general box collection. Then I scooted all three piles out of the way, moved everything else that had once been there, swept, and started stacking boxes. I've got one empty shelf there already, but more are coming soon. When the truck shows up, it should only take a few hours to move all the boxes into the truck, and anyone who shows up to help will know exactly what to do.
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