Moving to a new house with kids, pets, and everything in the house can be a recipe for disaster if not managed and planned properly. Every step poses different challenges, from hunting the new home to making all the moving and packing arrangements.
Though it is impossible to eliminate all the stress, you can indeed reduce the bouts of anxiety you feel about packing, loading, and moving everything from your current to your new house. Below are helpful tips for streamlining the moving process and making it stress-free.
1. Start the packing process early on
The moving process includes so many details. Even the most meticulous and organized person is prone to making mistakes and forgetting things while packing at the last minute. Therefore, it is better if you start your packing early. Starting early has a lot of benefits.
- You will not face a mad rush for supplies or packing boxes, nor will you break items in haste.
- You get ample time to time to carefully pack delicate items.
- You can declutter your house, sort out and pile up things that have no place going to your home. These include old clothes, kitchen appliances, furniture, etc.
- Early packing will also help you arrange for things you cannot move with the rest of the stuff.
Moving delicate items like vintage pieces and art collections is very risky. Therefore, you must put them in a storage facility and move them later. If you live in a city like Nashville, where the weather is extreme throughout the year, opt for storage units Nashville facility, which is temperature-controlled and affordable. Choosing an affordable unit will not hurt your budget much.
The benefit of having temperature-controlled storage units is that the internal temperature of these storage cubicles always remains at a certain level. Therefore, delicate pieces such as vintage furniture, art collections, and so on don’t get damaged due to extreme heat, cold, or humidity.
2. Pick a moving company
Choosing a moving company may look like the easiest part of the moving process. But actually, this is the riskiest part. The safety of your items depends on the services provided by the moving company. If you don’t choose wisely, your belongings will face the danger of breakage, theft, or plain mishandling.
Therefore, before going with a moving company, do your research. Contact them over the phone or visit their office. Get in touch with at least three moving companies.
Compare rates and look at companies’ customer reviews and ratings online. Also, ask about their policies for breakage and theft during the moving process.
The earlier you start your research, the better, as it will take some time before you find the right company to do this job for you.
3. Make a checklist of essential tasks
The whole moving process includes countless tasks that must be done before you leave the house. If stress makes you forget important tasks, make a checklist. Paste this list on the wall where you can see it. This list will remind you what has already been done and what tasks are still left.
When you have written down everything, and it is right in front of your eyes, the chances of making mistakes or forgetting things become very slim.
Make a checklist when months away from the actual moving instead of a week before the moving day. Making it then won’t benefit you much because after working for so long without a plan, the stress of the approaching moving day will engulf you anyway. Therefore, prepare this checklist early to streamline the entire process.
4. Label the boxes
Whether you are packing your stuff or the moving company is doing that on your behalf, label all the boxes according to their content. Grab a permanent marker to label boxes on all sides. For instance, you can write tags such as “books,” baby clothes,” housework products for kitchen’ “toy,” and so on.
Labeling boxes with their contents helps you keep track of all the stuff during the move. Also, when you are in your new place, and your stuff is still packed, you won’t be rummaging through all the boxes if you need something. Due to labeling, you will directly approach the correct box and take out your desired item.
5. Take care of the paperwork
One of the dicey aspects of moving homes is losing important stuff—papers and important documents always top the list. Therefore, before you take things out of the drawers and cupboards, take care of the important documents and papers.
Your passport, wills, property documents, identity cards, etc., should be in a separate box or bag and kept somewhere safe. On moving day, ensure the box of documents and paper doesn’t go on the moving truck with the rest of the stuff. Always keep your important documents with you.
Also, a wiser plan is to create electronic copies of everything and store them in your cloud storage. In case you lose an important document, you will still have a way to recover them.
6. Try to get the keys to your new house early
If possible, request the owners of your new place to give you the keys a little early. This way you can go there and clean the house. Also, you can make a mental map of what should go where. When the truck with your belongings arrives, you can direct the staff to place boxes in rooms and areas of the house where they belong. This small step will reduce the stress of unpacking stuff considerably.
Conclusion
Feeling overwhelmed and making preventable mistakes during the process of moving is not something new. It gets more challenging when you are moving home for the first time.
However, extensive planning and making the right decisions at an appropriate time can reduce the associated moving stress. Some tips that can make your move more streamlined and stress-free are mentioned above; read through them to make moving easier.
