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Comment by veleek | Hacker News Reader

Because you can’t search that without physically looking at each box. There could be a bunch odd reasons that many boxes remain unpacked; downsizing, temporary housing. It’d be nice to be able to finds the one thing you need (you could even label the issue with the box location!).

Anyway, a fun solution but I think it’s more effort than I would have been willing to put in even if I would have appreciated the outcome.

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I moved a couple weeks ago, and was quite confused when--after repeatedly searching through every kitchen box--we were missing the flour, sugar, and pasta.

Turns out one kitchen box got placed at the bottom of in a pile of book boxes in the living room.

If you unpack in a day, it's no big deal, but if you spent a week unpacking, you may find yourself having to eat something other than spaghetti for lunch, which is normally fine, but not when you really want spaghetti and the lack of spaghetti merely makes you more determined to find it.

I put a colored sticker on each box, where the color corresponds to the room where the box should go. The destination rooms are marked with the same stickers during the move, so helpers have an easy time telling where to put each box.

In addition, I’m numbering the boxes, and when packing them keep a list mapping the numbers to what’s in each box. So when later searching for something, I know it should be in box number x. This can be helpful even years later when you don’t unpack all boxes.

> This can be helpful even years later when you don’t unpack all boxes.

Indeed, this is one of the biggest reasons I tracked this information to begin with.

Do your local grocery stores not sell spaghetti?

I ended up buying spaghetti when I went to the store a couple days later, and now I have an abundance of spaghetti. But lunch that first day ended up being something else.

The good thing is, you can't have too much pasta.

>but if you spent a week unpacking

Look at you! I still have boxes packed from my move a decade ago. :-)

Time to bin them

"I wonder what ever happened to $VERY_IMPORTANT_DOCUMENT? It just disappeared"

> If you unpack in a day, it's no big deal

I think you’re supposed to unpack 80% on day one, and keep the rest boxed up for the next move?

Don't you still have to search for the box with the issue number, once you've found which number has what you need?

It's much faster to read a single number from 12 boxes than 3-4 pieces of text from 12 boxes.

Wouldn't a single text document have achieved the same purpose? With a heading for each box?

I liked being able to “close” the issue once I unpacked the box.

That makes sense. Open it when you close the box, close it once you open the box ;-)

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