Over the years, I’ve stored hundreds of items using dozens of bankers boxes. They are great because they hold a lot and can be stacked high, wide, and deep. However, it’s also easy to lose track of things absent a good system.
I recently put about 70 boxes in storage and here’s what I did. I packed them all using the general idea of keeping like things together.
I then numbered all of the boxes with a number in red on the outside of the box. I wrote the same number in red on a post-it note that I put inside the box (on top). I then took a picture of the contents of the open box (thus showing both the contents and the red number).
When I got to the storage facility, I stacked the boxes not in numerical order, but rather in the order in which I expected I might need to get into them later. In other words, any boxes I felt I might never or rarely need to get into, I put on bottom, and any I expected I might often (or soon) need to get into, I put on top.
Once all the boxes were in place, I numbered them sequentially, left to right, bottom to top, using a green marker. I then took pictures of the result in order to make a cross-reference list (showing the pairs of red and green numbers).
The green number now tells me the general location of the box (which can also be seen by the pictures of the stacked boxes), while the red number tells me what’s in each box (based on the pictures of the contents).
I then combined all of the pictures (of the contents as well as the stacked boxes) into one .pdf, and used Excel to make the simple cross reference index.
Now, when I need to locate something, I just look for the picture of the open box showing the item(s) I need, note the red number from the post-it, then see where that red number is, either on the picture of all boxes or by cross-referencing it with the green number from the spreadsheet.
One Idea 