moving house using vacuum bags

For anyone who has ever moved home, which is the majority of us, you will know that it takes a lot of planning and organisation, if you want it to go smoothly that is. Only when you start to pull all your belongings, out of the cupboards, wardrobes, the loft, garage or any other nook and cranny you have used for storage, do you realise how much stuff you actually have.

One of the biggest culprits for taking time and effort to pack and sort and for taking up boxes worth of space are your clothes and bedding. This is because most of us have more clothes and bedding than we need and more than fit in our wardrobes, so we end up with them stashed inside black bin bags and thrown in the loft or garage or anywhere out of site. Now there is also a good reason for having these extra clothes and bedding in the UK and that is the variation in temperatures between the seasons. The winters are cold and the summers can be warm (if we are  lucky) so we do end up needing different clothes for the different seasons and there is no need to have your bulky coats and jumpers taking up space in your wardrobe in the middle of summer and the same goes for that extra thick duvet you have in winter so you store them away.

The issue now comes when you are moving house that you not only have a wardrobes and drawers full of clothes that you don’t really know how to transport efficiently but you also have flimsy bin bags full of clothes and bedding in storage. An option is to buy suitcases but this seems a waste of money just to use for a short term and then you are left with a bulky suitcase you don’t need at the end of it.

The last time I moved I decided that I was going to try using vacuum storage bags for all my clothes, bedding, curtains, you name it. I was so happy I did, it made the whole process a lot easier and saved us fewer trips back and forth as there were fewer boxes in the van. The bags themselves are huge so we could fit a lot of stuff in them. Aside from the space they save by removing the air and making the surface area that your clothes take up a lot smaller, they also provided a way to transport them without using a bulky box or suitcase, because they are pretty tough, we just put them in the back of the van as they were and didn’t have to worry about any dust or water or anything getting to them.
The packing process itself was simple, just loaded the bags with the clothes, zipped them up making sure they were tightly sealed and then placed the vacuum cleaner nozzle over the valve and sucked the air out. We used a marker pen to write straight onto the plastic so we knew which bag was for which room.

At the new home the benefit was that we were in less of a rush to unpack all the clothes as they didn’t take up lads of room like a box normally does, we had a bit of DIY work to do in the bedrooms before unpacking fully, so we just kept the essential items out and handy while the rest stayed in the bags until we were done. Any of the seasonal clothes and bedding that we had stored in the loft just went straight back up there in the new home, and will stay protected until we need them again.

So if you are moving home any time soon, I highly recommending grabbing yourself a box of  vacuum storage bags to make your lives a little easier.