Renovation Without the Box Maze

The letter from the property management is polite and very precise. New kitchen from the third week of next month. Bathroom after that. Floors sanded at the end. Please make sure the rooms concerned are cleared.

Cleared is a small word for a big job. A kitchen holds more than anyone remembers until it has to be emptied. A floor can’t be sanded around a bookshelf. And somewhere between the second and the third weekend of carrying boxes, most people realise the renovation isn’t the hard part. Living around it is.

The three usual answers

Stack everything in the one room that isn’t being done. It works, in a way. The bedroom becomes a maze of boxes with a bed in the middle. You know the coffee machine is in there somewhere, and you won’t see it again until it’s all over. Every time the workers need that room too, the maze moves.

Spread it across friends and family. The parents’ cellar, a friend’s garage, the neighbour’s Estrich. It costs nothing but favours, and your things end up at three addresses with no list of what went where. When the work is done, you collect them again: three more trips, and the question of which box went to whom.

Rent a unit and carry it there yourself. Now everything is in one place, but you had to borrow a van, find helpers and give up two weekends, one to take it there and one to bring it back. In between, your things sit behind a door you can’t see through, and if you need the winter jackets in week four, you drive there.

None of these is wrong. Each just moves the work onto you, at the moment you have the least room for it.

What actually helps

Whatever you choose, a few things make a renovation lighter.

1. Ask early what has to be empty, and when. The management or the contractor knows which rooms are affected and in which order. A clear date per room tells you what has to go out first, and what can wait.
2. Sort by when you’ll need it, not by room. The question isn’t “what’s in the kitchen?” It’s “what will I need before the work is done?” Everything else can go further away than you think.
3. Pack one box for living in the meantime. Kettle, two pans, the plates you use every day, chargers, the documents you may need. It stays with you, labelled, easy to find.
4. Write down what leaves. A photo of each box’s contents takes seconds now and saves an afternoon of searching later. Things that are out of sight are quickly out of mind, and “I know it’s somewhere” is not a list.
5. Decide on the way out, not on the way back. A renovation is the one moment everything passes through your hands anyway. What you no longer want back can move on now: to someone who needs it, instead of back into the new kitchen.

Where dingx fits

This is the job we built dingx for: things that need to be somewhere else for a while, and come back afterwards.

We pick it up before the workers arrive, from your door, so there’s no van to borrow and no weekend lost. dingx is designed so that every item is photographed and listed, and you can see what you own in the app: while the dust settles, nothing is “somewhere”. If you need the winter jackets in week four, we bring them. When the new floor is dry, everything comes back: all at once, or piece by piece, as the rooms are ready.

And the things you decided not to take back don’t have to go into a skip. They can move on, to someone who can use them, so they stay in use (see Nothing Is Wasted). Your things stay yours the whole time. We look after them; we never own them. If you want to know what happens to them in between, What Happens to Your Things After Pickup walks through it step by step.

A renovation has an end date. Your things should come back at the end, not get in your way before it.

We are starting with our first neighbourhoods in Winterthur. If a renovation letter is on your kitchen table, or soon will be, join the waitlist, or message us on WhatsApp.