The door closes behind you. The room has a bed, a desk, a wardrobe with a few hangers and a chest of drawers. The case goes on the rack. What you do in the next few moves decides whether you live out of the drawers for the stay or dig through the case every morning.
With cubes, moving in is a short list of moves. Moving out is the same list, backwards.
Arriving: move in by the piece
- Open the case. It looks the way you packed it: cubes in rows, mesh tops up, the shoes in their frosted bag at the wheel end.
- Lift the large cube out by its side handle and set it in the bottom drawer as it is. Open the two-way zipper along one side and fold the lid back. That drawer is unpacked.
- The medium cube, with the tops, goes in the drawer above. The small cube, with socks and underwear, goes in the top drawer or on a shelf.
- Take out the shirts that crease and put them on hangers.
- Put the small pouch with the chargers on the bedside table, next to the outlet.
- Take out the shoes you will wear. The rest stay in their bag on the wardrobe floor.
- Open the medium frosted bag and leave it in the wardrobe, ready for the first worn shirt.
- Close the case and slide it under the bed or onto the wardrobe shelf.
Apart from the shirts on hangers, nothing has left a cube. The drawer holds the cube, and the cube holds the clothes.
Living there
In the morning you open a drawer and see socks through the mesh, the tops standing in a row. Unzip one corner, take what you need and zip it shut. Worn clothes go straight into the frosted laundry bag, so the cubes only ever hold clean ones.
The chargers live in their pouch by the bed. Each night the phone cable goes back into it after the phone is charged, so the last morning holds no search under the pillow.
When the room has no drawers
Some rooms have a luggage rack and nothing else. Then the case is the chest of drawers. Leave it open on the rack, cubes mesh up, and take from them where they sit. The bag of shoes goes on the floor beside it, and the laundry bag next to that.
The night before you leave
- Zip each cube shut in its drawer, then lift it back into the case by its handle, into the place it came from.
- Fold the shirts from the hangers and lay them on top of the medium cube, or in the large pouch.
- The laundry bag goes in at the bottom, next to the shoes, away from the clean clothes.
- A cube you have half emptied packs lower than it did on the way out. One you have emptied collapses flat and goes in the lid.
- Pack everything except the chargers pouch. Leave it on top of the shoes you will wear tomorrow, and it goes in last, in the morning.
- Open each drawer once. They should be empty, because nothing ever left a cube for long.
On a trip with several stops
For a one-night stop, do not move in at all. Keep the next day's top and socks in the small cube, then lift out only that cube and the chargers pouch. The rest stays in rows in the case, zipped, until the next real stop.
When a stop has a washing machine, the laundry bag empties into it and the clean clothes go back into the cubes they came from. The map stays the same for the whole trip, so the case at the last stop opens the way it did at the first.
For how to pack the case in the first place, read how to pack a carry-on with packing cubes. For what goes in each of the nine pieces, read what goes in which piece.
Want it drawn for your own trip or case? The pack planner lays the nine pieces out to scale and shows what goes where.
The set is three cubes and three pouches in Grey, Burgundy or Hot Pink, and three frosted bags. See the set.