I’ve moved house well over 20 times in my life and a handful of those moves were international ones. Most of us don’t love moving house, because even if it can be exciting to get ready to start your life in a new place, it can certainly be a lot of work.
As I’m about to move house (well apartments really), I thought I’d take you along and share my 5 top tips for a stress free move.
- Put together a list. Yep, it’s time to get all those things out of your head and onto paper or some form of digital list. Trying to remember things is a recipe for stress and poor sleep… I prefer to use a digital list, but if you’re a paper list person that’s cool too! It just saves a lot of stress to have a clear list with some timelines and best of all – the ability to tick things off that list!
- Delegate tasks and share responsibilities. It’s hard to ask for help sometimes, and if you are single and moving by yourself, it’s unavoidable you’ll have to do most of it. That said, it’s important to delegate and/or ask for help. I have lost count of the times I’ve helped friends unpack and carry boxes. I’ve also been incredibly lucky to have had that support when I asked for it. This time I’m lucky to have a partner in crime so we decided to divide the tasks pretty evenly. Doing it all yourself just to get it your way or prove that you can (to all the perfectionists out there, you know what I mean…) is simply not the most helpful way to go about it. Let other people help you and remember that kids are very capable of helping out too!
- Start decluttering. It makes no sense to move things with you that you don’t like, want or use. There are lots of different ways of decluttering, I personally prefer to do it by room/zone. Feel free to check out my previous decluttering video if you want some tips on how I do it. My best advise would be to start early and do a little bit at a time. You’d be amazed how much stuff you can get rid of! Remember how silly it is that you might even have paid someone or carried those extra boxes of stuff you might now have even known you had.
I also recommend that you try and donate, sell or recycle anything you can to make sure you declutter in a sustainable way. Check out my video here for some tips around this. - Divide tasks into smaller chunks. I usually do this by packing/clearing out one area at a time, especially those areas that are easy to put off because they can be so overwhelming (garage, storage unit, messy broom closet). I’ve found that if I do little mini projects over the course of a few weeks, it feels a lot more manageable than getting everything done in 2 days. Especially this time around, I’ve found that my energy has been lower than usual due to the pandemic and heavy lockdown where we live in the lead up to this move.
- Try to clean and set up the new place before you move all the furniture in. Sometimes we don’t have this luxury, but this time we got the keys 4 days before the moving truck was booked. It was so nice to go over to the new house, bring a few smaller things we did not want to put in the truck and clean the place out. Unpacking is so much easier when you have clean spaces to put things away in. And yes, those movers will bring in dirt on their shoes, but that’s easily cleaned off at the end of the day. 🙂
What are your favourite moving tips? And what was the worst move you ever did?