Are you relocating on a time limit and quickly nearing the end of your deadline? If so, it's worth taking a break to read this post. These four tips will save you loads of time and make your life a little easier while packing up and moving to a new place.

1. Buy Your Tape From A Craft Store

If you're heading to the hardware store to buy the tape you'll use to seal your moving boxes, stop right there. You can eliminate all the time you'd otherwise spend labeling your boxes by buying your tape at a craft store instead. Duct tape jewelry, accessories, and even clothing are a growing trend right now, and craft stores are catering to this trend by stocking their shelves with rolls of duct tape in nearly every color and design you could imagine.

Instead of getting a marker (which you'll likely lose 100 times during the course of packing), assign each room of your current home a color. Seal the moving boxes that come out of those rooms with their corresponding colors, and you'll tape and label your boxes in one easy step. You can even take this tip a step further and get different patterns of each color tape for the different categories of items from each room. For example, you could buy all green tape to seal your kitchen boxes, but get green tape with stars to seal boxes that contain dishes, green tape with hearts to seal boxes that contain pantry items, and so on. 

2. Forget About Packing Your Clothes

When you're on a time crunch, it doesn't make a lot of sense to remove all the clothing from every dresser drawer in your home and pack it in boxes, only to unpack it and put it all back in those dresser drawers once you arrive at your new house.

Instead, buy yourself a few big rolls of cling wrap. As you remove each drawer from your dressers, wrap cling wrap all the way around it, and then load it into your moving truck, stacking the drawers with a towel in-between each to prevent them from rubbing against and scratching each other. The drawers won't take up any more room than the moving boxes you would have used, your clothes will be held in place and protected, and when you arrive at your new home all you need to do is remove the cling wrap and slide the drawers back into your dressers.

3. Say No To Newspaper

When your friends and family found out you'd be moving to a new place, there's a good chance they immediately started stashing away their daily newspapers in a helpful gesture to save you some money on packing supplies. It's time to let all of them know that they can put those stacks of paper right in their recycle bins.

Newspaper is a horrible choice in packing material because the print on the paper bleeds easily, leaving black stains all over your hands, your furniture, your dishes, and anything else you try to protect with it.

While it's a cheap option to just rally up your loved ones' used reading material, you'll waste a lot of time washing newspaper-dirtied breakables when it comes time to unpack your things. Instead, purchase yourself some newsprint -- it's like newspaper but without ink all over it.

4. Stop By The Liquor Store

You'll need quite a bit of that newsprint to pack all of your glassware. Unless, of course, you decide to completely skip wrapping your glasses in protective packing and stop by your local liquor store for some segmented boxes instead.

When liquor stores get their beer and other alcohol, it comes in boxes that are perfectly-sized to allow for minimal shifting of the inventory. The boxes also have a grid-like cardboard piece that protects each and every bottle by keeping it in its own little square cardboard cubbyhole. From jigger boxes that will perfectly fit your shot glasses to half-gallon bourbon shipment boxes that will hold your glass pitchers, there's a good chance your liquor store has just what you need to pack your glassware without having to wrap a thing.

While you're there, feel free to pick yourself up a treat to celebrate all the time you just shaved off of your move.

It's always nice to have plenty of time to sort and pack your things when preparing for a move, but this often isn't the case. If you need to relocate and you only have a limited amount of time to do it, use the above tips to speed up the process. Also, consider hiring a packing service like Bekins Van Lines Inc to really speed the process along.