I made two important changes in my most recent move — and it made the process so much easier

Moving is the worst. We're all on the same page here, right? Lifting heavy objects is awful, as is moving said objects, as is carefully placing them down once more. 

The process is tiring and stressful and expensive. Having lived in cities since starting college in 2006, I've moved... too many times in the past 10 years. I moved to Philadelphia, around Philadelphia, to Barcelona, back to Philadelphia, to New York City, and twice during my time here. A lot of moves.

And just this past week, I did it again.

My wife and I moved from one neighborhood in Brooklyn to another, just 10 or so blocks apart. But this time, we made two crucial changes:

1. We hired movers (not packers, but movers who would move our boxes and furniture and whatever else from our old place to our new place).
2. Instead of buying/collecting a bunch of cardboard boxes we'd end up throwing away anyway, we used a rental service that provided strong, re-usable plastic bins in varying sizes. 

The first option isn't viable for everyone, of course. Movers can be expensive (thankfully, ours weren't), and there's always a risk they'll break something (ours totally did).

The second choice we made, however, is viable for most people. And it made a huge difference in how we moved.

We used a service named Gorilla Bins, which came highly recommended by Yelp users.

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Gorilla was suggested by our moving company, and the reviews online were rock solid. Like this one:

Just completed my 2 weeks stint with Gorilla Bins and I would definitely move with them again. Drop off and pick up is absolutely painless and having no boxes to build/break down/dispose of is such a luxury. From a price perspective, these were actually less expensive than the boxes my moving company offered to provide, and I chose Gorilla over the other reusable packing companies because they offered the 2 sized boxes in their standard package and were still priced competitively against those who were offering fewer total boxes and in just 1 size.

There are other services similar to Gorilla Bins, like Bin-It, which operate in more locations:

Bin-It is a service similar to Gorilla Bins which is offered in New York City, Philadelphia, and Nashville. Here's a video of how it works:

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But something we really loved about Gorilla Bins is the different box sizes. There were medium and large boxes, which helped to break up our stuff into easily movable piles of boxes.

It's easy to overload boxes with heavy stuff, and the smaller boxes helped us to compartmentalize stuff (like heavy books!) into manageable boxes. In so many words: it helped to stop us from overpacking any particular box.