I’ve been rather quiet during the last couple of weeks, but this time there is at least a good reason for that: My girlfriend and I decided to move together into a new apartment in the South of Graz 🎉 We had lots of help from relatives
- some of them even lived with us for some days before and after the actual move - but as we had tons of things to do and lots of hands available we also had quite a bit of organisational work to do. Everything should be ready for the day when we’d get the keys to the new apartment and the movers would come.
For this we set up a Kanban status board on one of the walls in my girlfriend’s apartment. First, we had a column for the open tasks, those in progress, and those completed. This worked fine for the first part of the move but we soon realised that most of the tasks could only be completed by certain people on certain days. Do represent that on our board we split the todo-column up into one for every day.
Every morning at 09:00 o’clock we held a standup meeting were everyone said what they were planning to do on that day. If someone wasn’t present they got a photo of the updated board via Signal or Wire.
The big day came and we were mostly prepared. Out of all the furniture that was moved only one cabinet was damaged. But even that had its upside as we learnt about one of the hidden gems at Ikea: Every store has a little section hidden in the self-service area where you can find single parts (like boards) which you cannot buy otherwise on their own! Every piece we wanted to move into the new apartment was moved on that day and also put onto its final place!
Even after the move was complete we continued with our status board for a couple of days to organise all the little things left to do: Moving the last boxes to the welfare, announcing our new primary address at the authorities, and so on. Could we have completed the move without a board? Yes, but it would definitely have been more chaotic. This way, everyone knew what was left to do and by what time it had to be completed.
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