[vc_row][vc_column][vc_column_text]After 16 years my family just completed a major move.  I expected this to be a lot of work.  But I was surprised at how stress affected my mood and sleeping patterns even though I felt well prepared.  Let me share with you a few tips to help ease your next move.

  1. Go Through Your Closet:  Start cleaning months ahead or before you even pick out your next home.  Discard clothes that you no longer wear and box clothes that are out of season for storage.  If your home is for sale it is even more important to clean your closet.  A full closet makes a new buyer feel that there won’t be adequate room for them as well.
  2. Decrease the Clutter:  My trash day was every Friday so I made sure that by Thursday I would tackle a room or closet and get rid of any unnecessary items, décor or trash.   Trust me you won’t want the trash at your new home and you can’t leave a pile a mile high on moving day.
  3. Start packing:  One of the best pieces of advice I got was from a friend who said,”just purchase boxes at Uhaul”.  The reason is that they are all the same size and stack so well.  So after using Amazon boxes of all sizes and shapes, I finally made a trip to Uhaul and purchased the necessary boxes.  I purchased about 200 boxes for our move and it cost about $150.00.   It was well worth every penny to buy boxes that were great quality and stacked like Jenga – in fact I repacked many of the items into the Uhaul boxes.   TIP 1:  For Kitchen items use small boxes and pack the heavy stuff on the bottom with lighter stuff on top  TIP 2:  Buy packing tape that says Kitchen, Bedroom, Bathroom etc.  – it made it easy to direct traffic on the other end.  I just added a strip to each box after closing them with the usual brown tape.  https://www.uhaul.com/MovingSupplies/Tape/Smart-Move-Tape?mid=90
  4. Moving Company vs. Family & friends.  However you decide to move I would suggest you spend some time planning the moving day.  We had 2 estimates from moving companies and both were about 25% lower than the actual move because both companies thought that all our stuff would fit in 1 truck which unfortunately was not the case.  At 3 pm our wary movers broke the news to us that they would have to come back tomorrow and put in half a day (at $175/hour).  That’s when I decided I should have thrown more stuff away because it all became expensive to move.   If you have family & friends I would suggest you set your self in the line of sight of the door to direct traffic and make sure that you have enough transportation to haul it or you will be worn out.  The moving company put together our beds etc.  so if you have family move you may want to put someone in charge of that.  I want to tell you it felt so good to not have to build a bed after 12 hours of hard work.
  5. “Be kind to yourself in times of great stress”  I can tell you the stress of getting all the finances together, orchestrating the move, and a bit of buyers remorse caught up with me and I didn’t sleep well for a couple weeks.  Don’t sweat the pizza that you will devour, the small trinkets that are broken, or extra bill from the moving company.  Two weeks from move in date you will feel much better.  Just give yourself time.  Also realize that the move is tough on your family as well so give them some breathing room.  Things will be back to normal soon.

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