When it’s time to get your family on the road to a new home, you have a lot to consider. It’s easy to get quite overwhelmed by all the tasks you need to finish before you leave your rental or sell your home. Instead of exhausting yourself doing everything on your own, the tips below can protect your health, sanity and family dynamics.
Estate or Moving Sale Help
Moving requires you to make a lot of decisions. Consider hiring a moving sale service to reduce your decision load. For example, if your household has gotten smaller because children have moved out, you may be moving from a 4 bedroom house to a 2 bedroom home with an office.
Go through your home with a notepad and a set of multicolored sticky dots. Create a map of your new home and assign each room a color. Choose what pieces of furniture will go in each room. The moving sale service can be in charge of moving everything else out of your home.
This protects your safety in many ways. First of all, you don’t have to move these items to your garage or your yard for a moving sale; they will be moved once by the moving sale team and out of your way. Even better, you won’t be advertising to the world that you are moving soon and stuck having strangers wandering through your home.
Many moving sale teams will take the items that you are interested in selling and haul them away to a flea market or an auction house. While this will cut into your profits, it will also free up space and time that you need to keep going.
Packing Service
As you determine what is coming with you, you can start sorting your possessions into
- what needs packed for the move
- items to be taken to the consignment store
- things that can be donated
The whole sorting process can result in a great deal of decision fatigue. If you notice that you are second guessing yourself, a packing service can be a great help. For example, while they will likely bring the boxes, you can provide black and white trash bags. As they pack what you want to keep, you can take consignment store items in the white bags and donation items in the black bags and get them out of the house.
As you sort and get rid of things, the children in your household can help in short bursts of time. Let your little ones compete on how to stack items together and how to squash stuffed animals into a bin. However, they will lose interest before you run out of work. Hire a babysitting service to take them out for a bit of fun so you can make choices uninterrupted.
Cleaning Service
As your packing service fills the boxes, you may want to fill up a pod in front of your home. If you don’t have room for a pod, clear away one area of your home along the wall, preferably on a solid surface flooring rather than carpet. As soon as you get a room emptied, consider bringing in a cleaning service to deep clean the space.
If this is too disruptive, do your best to clear an entire floor and deep clean your house one floor at a time. By stacking boxes on a solid surface, you can get your carpets cleaned without having to move anything and allow them to dry fully.
Your cleaning service should be able to help you spot repairs and corrections that need to be made. For example, your carpets may just need cleaned, or they may need patching or replacing. As your cleaning service goes through your bathroom and kitchen cabinets, you may need small drips addressed or other fixes made before you list your home.
Car Transport Service
For those moving with small children, the comfort of using your regular family vehicle can go a long way to reducing upset among your little ones. For your other vehicles and motorcycles, an enclosed auto transport service may be the best option.
If you’re planning a cross-country road trip adventure to move your family, you’ll want to carefully review your coolers and other outdoor gear. For example, a picnic cooler could be terrific for one meal, but your cross-country trip could be greatly improved by a 12 volt refrigerator and a packing box on top of your family transport. This may mean adding a rack to your van or SUV, but the extra storage could make everyone in your vehicle much more comfortable on your trip.
Do make sure to double check all your electronic devices so everyone can access their favorite books and games on the road. If any of your devices are wi-fi dependent, setting up a wi-fi hotspot in the car can keep everyone much happier and better entertained.
Unpacking Service
Once you get to your new home, you may consider an unpacking service. If you used the colored dots method, the movers should be able to easily settle all furniture and boxes into your new space. However, unpacking all those boxes while you are also trying to get settled in at a new job and settling children in at a new school may be too much to manage.
An unpacking service can also be helpful if you have had any moving truck delays. Often, large moving services will pack multiple households on one truck and drop them off, one household at a time, as they cross the country. It only takes one mechanical challenge to delay your possessions getting delivered. If you have two weeks to get settled in your new home and your possessions are delayed by a week, an unpacking service can lower the mayhem level.
Moving your household requires a lot of decisions. If you are struggling to get started, a moving sale team can help. If you have time to pack but don’t have the energy to clean, hire a cleaning service. Finally, look into unpacking services to help you find quiet and ease in your new space.