My number one, top moving tip? Don’t move! LOL!
A little background so you understand where I am coming from. My husband and I bought our current home shortly after we were first married. We have lived here since 1986. I can still remember how excited we were to be moving from an apartment into our very first home. It was a brand new home and we had all these wonderful ideas about how we were going to make it even more super fabulous. It was a huge home for just the two of us at the time. We didn’t even have enough furniture to use all the rooms in the house.
Over the years we raised our two sons in this house and slowly filled it up, with memories and stuff. I am pretty good about going through the house and purging items on a fairly regular basis, but after 33 years, I confess we have accumulated quite a lot of stuff!
We have worked hard over the years and now we are so blessed to be moving into our dream home. Sounds exciting right? It is, and I am so very grateful and I thank God every day for this blessing. But there are so many things that we need to do, so many decisions to make, before we can enjoy living in our new home!
So I want to share some helpful tips with you today that will make your next move go more smoothly. These are tips I learned firsthand during our move.
Tip #1: Don’t put off doing home improvement projects.
Currently we are completing the last of the home improvement projects in our current house that we put off over the years. If I have any useful advice to give, it would be not to do them all right before you are going to put your house on the market. It is a recipe for high stress and constant snipping and snarking and arguing. You are tired, you just want to be done already, nothing ever goes as planned, everything costs at least double what you budgeted, there are numerous trips to Lowes and Home Depot for another supply you need, your life is chaos…ugh!
Tip #2: Purge, purge, purge!
Donate items to your favorite local charity, some will even come to your home to pick up items. After a weekend of packing and purging I take all the items that I want to donate and drop them off at my favorite charity on my way into the office.
If you get enough traffic in front of your home, place larger items at the curb with a “free” sign. It’s like the furniture fairies come in the night and whisk away your unwanted items! This has worked great for us.
Schedule a large trash pick-up with your local utility. Where we live, we can utilize this service up to 3 times a year. This is a great service to take advantage of to get rid of leftover building supplies, lumber, pipes, old tires, appliances, etc. Be sure to check what items are acceptable and what is not acceptable for pick up in your area.
Post items online to sell. I haven’t done this yet, I just haven’t had the time to deal with it, but there are several apps, like Nextdoor, that target neighborhoods in your local area. Join a local Facebook group and post items for sale. If you keep it local and someone purchases an item from you they can come by to pick it up, saving you the hassle of trying to figure out how to deliver it to them. I would only do this if you feel comfortable having strangers come to your home to collect items.
Tip #3: Please! Do not rent a storage unit for your extra stuff! Now is the time to finally deal with all the items you shoved into closets because you couldn’t make that final decision about what to do with it. Once it was out of sight, it was out of mind. When you come across those items, ask yourself if you will ever use it. Has it been in the closet, forgotten and unused for years? Then it’s time to bless someone else with it. Do you really want to junk up your new place with all that clutter? Or pay hundreds of dollars each month to store it? Now is the time to be brutal and get rid of those unused items!
When you pack up to move you will find all those items you put away in a really good place and then forgot where that really good place was. Like the items you hid when your child is on restriction for so long that you forget where you hid them? Those items that were lost in your house for years; like my son’s Nintendo DS. LOL!
Tip #4: Start looking for free moving boxes. As soon as you know for sure that you will be moving, start scouring the neighborhood apps for neighbors that are trying to get rid of moving boxes. My husband gave me a hard time when I came home with a car full of moving boxes several months before we were going to move. But now he sees the wisdom of my ways. Families are always moving and if you plan ahead you can score all the boxes you will need for free! I love free!
Tip #5: Start packing early. I went through our closets, and purged unused and broken items. Then I packed up the rest and labeled everything clearly. Doing this on a consistent basis, using small chunks of time on the weekends, has made packing much more manageable and less overwhelming. I decided to tackle one closet at a time. After a few weekends I had almost all the closets packed and ready to go. Seeing the stacks of boxes in our spare bedroom all packed up and ready to go really lowered my anxiety level considerably. It felt good seeing the tangible progress I was making.
Be easy on yourself and your family, moving is very stressful and has a tendency to bring out the grouchy in just about everyone. Do your best to plan ahead, pace yourself, pack early and be kind to your family. You will get to the other side and be in your new home and the move will be behind you before you know it.