Top Rated Senior Moving Services
Roy, Utah

In every downsizing move there is a point where somebody opens a cupboard and finds forty years of photographs, letters, slides, certificates and papers.

Everything else in the house has an obvious route: keep, sell, donate, dispose. This does not, and it is the thing that stalls the whole process for weeks.

Just-In-Time Moving works throughout Roy and Weber County.

Separate it out first, and do not sort it now

The important rule. Photographs and papers take enormous amounts of time to go through, and doing it in the middle of a move means either rushing it or stopping everything.

Put all of it in labelled boxes, move it, and deal with it afterwards when there is time. It is light, so it costs almost nothing to transport, and this is the one category where moving everything and deciding later is the right answer.

Find the important documents before anything else

Separate from the sentimental question. Before packing starts, go through the house looking only for deeds, wills, insurance policies, financial records, military service documents, birth and marriage certificates, and anything with an official look.

In a long-occupied home these are rarely together. They are in books, tins, coat pockets, taped inside drawers and mixed among photographs.

Those travel with a family member, never on a truck.

When you do go through it

A few things that make it manageable.

Do it with the person, if you can. This is the best part of the whole process rather than a chore. Photographs nobody can identify become worthless within one generation, and the person who can name them is right there.

Record them talking about it if they will let you. That is worth more than the photographs.

Write on the back in soft pencil, or on the sleeve. Names, places, roughly when.

Do not split originals between family members in the moment. Scan and share instead; several people can then have the same picture.

Expect duplicates. Film-era prints came in twos and threes, and discarding genuine duplicates is not the same as discarding memories.

Storage conditions matter

Not an attic, not a garage and not an unheated storage unit. Heat and temperature swings do real damage to prints, and slides and negatives are worse.

Boxes on a shelf inside the house is better than anything else available.

Keep letters and documents flat rather than folded and rubber-banded, since bands perish and mark paper.

Digitising

Worth doing for the ones that matter rather than all of them. Whether you use a service or a scanner, do the identified ones first, and back the files up somewhere other than one computer.

Call (435) 862-3080 or email office@movingjustintime.com.