Most people change their place of living at least once in their lives.
But are you actually prepared for it?
No matter how hard you try to pack all of your belongings in time, you always end up having quite a stressful moving experience. If you’re not using this moving tips and tricks.
However, you can make the whole process at least a little bit less exhausting for yourself by using this moving tips and tricks. Preparing properly and avoiding such troubles as accidentally losing or breaking some of your goods.
To help you with that, we have put together 18 useful moving tips and tricks that will make the whole thing much easier.
Checklists have always been a great way to prepare for a big event. Moving to a new house works the same way. These are quite easy to make and will help you to save lots of nerves instead of trying to keep everything in your mind.
The best way to create your own checklist is to start around the month before the day of moving. At this stage, you simply have to start by separating things that will require your special attention (documents, valuables, etc.) and collecting them all in a single place.
It’s also a time to choose a moving company and confirm the details of your arrangement. When doing this, consider the following:
This is also a good moment to start packing the things that you aren’t going to use anytime soon. While doing this, you can try to start dealing with legal matters. Think of organizations that have to know your up-to-date address and try to inform them about the changes beforehand.
Two weeks before the move is another deadline. By this date try to finish packing most of your belongings, re-check your arrangement with a moving company, and ask your employer for a day-off.
Moving to a new house not only takes a lot of time but also a considerable sum of money. Saving ahead would help to ease the whole process significantly – you won’t have to worry about the costs and additional expenses.
The best way to prepare your wallet for a move is to plan your budget. One of the most expensive parts is always transportation. First of all, consider whether you want to do everything on your own or hire a company. Then count the approximate cost of the chosen option (if you can’t make up your mind between the two of them, you might want to calculate both costs and compare them).
The second item in your list of expenses is the package. To avoid splashing out check which of your items actually need additional protection, what are the exact amounts of boxes and wrapping you actually need, and whether you can use something you already have (cardboard boxes/bags/backpacks/suitcases/labels and markers/tape/etc.)
It’s almost impossible to relocate everything you own, so you might want to get rid of the stuff you don’t really need. Packing up is a great time to get rid of things such as closes you don’t wear or household appliances you don’t use.
First of all, find all the things you have already been going to get rid of. If nothing comes to mind, try taking a different approach – make a list of the things you own and start eliminating the most necessary ones. If you can’t decide whether you really need something, think of a particular case when you can use it and try to remember how often this happens to you.
When you have collected all of the unnecessary stuff, distribute items between the following categories:
Just as everything else, the right moving date can save you a lot of time, energy and even money. First of all, consider your own needs and what your moving company offers (if you hire the one). If you have no restrictions regarding the date and the time of day, then a perfect day for a move would be a working day before the weekend or a holiday. Choosing a holiday itself is a huge mistake as it will cost you way more than choosing a weekday. Similarly, summer is the most expensive season, but be cautious if you chose seasons like autumn and winter and consider the climate of your region. And as for the best time of the day, the answer is easy – as early as you can. The sooner you start, the more time you’ll have to settle down and unpack.
Packing up your belongings is quite hard, but unpacking them might not be easier. Most probably, you’ll leave most of the boxes for tomorrow, so make sure that you have a separate storing space for the essentials. This way you won’t have to open each and every box to find something you’ll need by the end of the day of the relocation.
Alongside your personal essentials, it would be useful to pack some food for lunch and dinner. These may be some dishes prepared beforehand, or something easy to cook – pasta, snacks, bread, and jam, or ready-to-cook food. Prepare that you might not have the energy or conditions to cook or go to the local store. And don’t forget to pack some water, beverages, instant coffee or tea bags and some cutlery.
All of these things can be packed at the last moment. Still, it’s better to start preparing your box of essentials whenever you have some free time during your preparations. This way you’ll be able to double-check everything before setting off. If choosing the most necessary things is hard for you, follow a simple rule: think of whatever you will need in the next 24 hours and pack it.
One of the most critical parts of the relocation process is hiring a good moving company. These people will take all of your boxes and furniture, load them into a truck and move them all the way to your new location. This is a complicated work that requires a team of professional workers, offered by companies such as ProMovers Inc. Our moving company provides a range of moving services including long-distance and cross-country moving and take good care of your goods. Visit their website to get to know more about their services or arrange your relocation now. We at ProMovers Inc. provide convenient and affordable moving without delays.
Moving requires you to do hundreds of tasks beyond your everyday work. It’s hard for a single person’s brain to remember everything – and even if you can manage it, such prolonged stress can leave you completely worn out. This is why writing down all your tasks and creating a to-do list is a great way to make life easier for yourself. At the end, it isn’t an attempt to remember everything that takes away most of your resources – it’s a fear to forget something. So, creating a to-do list isn’t only safer than relying on human memory, but it also makes you more relaxed and allows you to concentrate on the tasks themselves.
While preparing to change your place of living, you have a great chance to think of who you have to notify about it. These might be your bank, your employer, companies that send you bills and insurance companies, and other parties that may need your current address. You can also phone or email your friends and colleagues to inform them about your moving (and ask for their assistance if you want). It’s also a good idea to contact the newspapers and magazines you’re subscribed to and ask them to add your new address to their databases.
When you start packing and relocating your electronics, you’ll be surprised with how many cables and chargers you have. To ease the unpacking process in your new house use the following trick: before unplugging each of your electronic devices take a picture of the connections. When you’ll be setting them up again, these pictures will be a useful reference.
Another tip that will help you to avoid damaging your goods is to put heavier things into smaller boxes. Packed into a big container alongside other things, your heavy items can crash the cardboard of the box while in a truck. That also makes moving the boxes easier as you won’t have to relocate a single huge box filled with heavy items.
One of the best things you can do to make your move easier is to start preparing in time. You can start by creating a checklist and analyzing your needs. According to these, find a moving company that will transport your belongings. When you decided that it’s time to start filling boxes, choose things that you use least often and pack them.
Don’t try to pack everything in a single day. Before getting into the work, make a to-do list and a schedule. Organize your packing-up process the way that is more convenient for you – and make day by day, room by room, and box by box plans.
If you’ve got only two weeks left, divide the time you have into four sections:
For fragile stuff like jewelry and electronics, use additional wrapping and protect each piece individually. By the way, with our moving service, you’ll get unlimited premium quality packing materials. Take out the batteries from electronic devices. Try to disassemble your furniture, but make sure that you remember how to put it together again. When it comes to packing documents, the most important steps are to organize them and scan the most important ones.
Cleaning all of your items before you wrap them up is going to make your life easier when you unpack them. You might not have enough energy for a complete clear-out when you’re in your new house, so take care of it while you are wrapping everything up.
Screws will be one of the most essential items during your relocation. Sorting them into plastic bags and labeling them (the way you do it with bigger boxes) is a necessary thing to do. When you arrive at your new house, and before you can even start to unpack, one of the first things to do is putting up the main furniture like wardrobes, beds, cupboards and so on. This is when all of your screws and bolts will have to be ready at hand.
Fragile items are hard to pack as a few of them require nearly as much of your attention as the rest of your belongings. Here are some measures you can take to protect them from damage during a relocation:
Categorizing your belongings room by room may be easier than having a separate box for each category. You can mix this method depending on how many things you have in each category. For example, you might need boxes for clothes, cutlery and stationery supplies, while everything else can be put into room boxes.
Unfortunately, the more ways of sorting the belongings you have, the harder it is to label each box containing them. Something that can help you here is a color code system. Assign every room with a single color and supply yourself with different-colored labels or tape reels. If you worry about forgetting what each color means, create a key-words list on a piece of paper or in your smartphone notes app.
Don’t try to minimize the number of boxes used, as this will end up with overpacking each of them. When sorting things between boxes, pay attention not only to their size but also to the weight of the filled box. There might be enough space inside a big box to contain everything, but in the end, it would be so heavy that you’ll hardly be able to move it. If this happens, try to redistribute the contents of the big box between several smaller ones. If some of the moving boxes are overpacked, they may end up with the items inside them pressing the bottom side of the box too hard and breaking it. It’s always better to prevent your belongings from damaging and yourself from harming your health by carrying heavy overpacked boxes.
You can save a lot of space inside your boxes and suitcases by following some simple advice:
If you carry any liquid products (this includes cleaning supplies, shampoos and shower gels, perfume and even beverages) to your new house, it’s important to store each one inside a separate plastic bar. This way, if one of the bottles is open during transportation, the spilled liquid won’t ruin the whole box. Zip bags guarantee the best protection, but you can replace them with several layers of wrap and plastic bags. To avoid spilling, you can also wrap the place where the cap connects to the bottle with a tape.
All in all, moving into a new place takes a lot of time and requires months of preparation. You can’t avoid the stress that comes with the perspective of putting away all of your belongings and relocating them into a new place. Yet you can make the whole process much easier for yourself! Simply by using tips and recommendations from this guide. The main points are to manage your time and energy and hire an excellent team of professionals to help you move to a new house. Call us today for a professional consultation and free moving quotes!