Moving in versus moving out

It's interesting to me that you can tell at a glance whether someone is moving in to a place, or moving out.

My folks are visiting in a few days, so we’re trying to vacate out old home office to give them somewhere to sleep. The computers, desks, and filing cabinets are all going off to another room -- the new home office.

I think we perceive whether a room in getting packed up, or moved in to, by what’s still there: when moving in, people start with the furniture; then set up the larger fixtures (computers, lamps); and finally unpack the small stuff. The contents of half-emptied boxes will look fairly compact. The room itself lacks miscellania.

In contrast, when moving out, a lot of the big stuff (furniture) and medium-sized stuff (computers) will have gone. So you end up with a lot of miscellaneous and unsorted cruft: coathangers, scraps of paper, shoeboxes of pens and pencils.

I’ll let you take a guess as to which end of the process these photos represent.


--GG