Patty Hammond 
Collecting crisis! Patty explores the pitfalls of moving with a large collection from one house to another.
My husband and I recently moved to a new house and this meant we needed to move our extensive collection of collectibles bag boxed and unboxed. These include music boxes, framed art, and figures from Star Wars, Disney, and Anime, which were originally housed among 10 different curio cabinets and several shelves. As you can imagine, the unboxed collectibles are a bit more difficult to move to the new house. We used bubble wrap, cardboard boxes, paper, plastic bags, and plastic totes when packing up the collection. We thought we did everything and we would be able to get everything over to the new house without incident. However, upon arriving at the new house, we discovered that there were a few items that did not quite make it during the move. Below are some of the pitfalls we experienced:
Accessories that were not easily identified as to which figure they belong to.
When we started unpacking the Star Wars and anime figures, we discovered lightsabers and other accessories that we could not identify which they belonged to. For now, we are putting these aside until we can figure this out.
Broken collectibles
No matter how careful we were, some items that we unpacked were damaged. Fortunately, many can be fixed with superglue, but there are some that we could not repair. One of these was a snow globe music box from The Beauty and The Beast. As we unpacked this item, we noticed that the water had drained from the globe and even though we tried to fix it, we discovered that it was too damaged to repair.
Curio cabinets were damaged during the move
Two of the 10 curio cabinets arrived at the new house damaged. One glass shelf lost a corner and will need to be replaced before we can use it. The other received damage due to a cleaning solution opening up and spilling in the UHaul truck during one of the moving trips. Even though there was some damage to our collection, it was not as bad as it could have been. My husband said that we got off pretty lightly. And that we will do what we can to repair or replace those that were damaged or destroyed.
Have you ever moved a large collection? What pitfalls did you experience? Sound off below. We’d love to hear from you.
I am a self proclaimed fangirl who is disguised as a mild mannered data analyst for a consulting firm. You can find me on Twitter as @pattybones2 or @Everyday_Fangrl
