Moving to a new house is an exciting and fairly rare event in a person's life.
Moving residences takes a lot of effort and a lot of preplanning for all the parties involved.
There are several things that must be considered and several tasks that must be planned in advance to make your moving experience the best it can be, and to allow yourself to be excited about your move to a new house instead of beaten down by the burden of moving.
Issues that need to be considered include the timing of the move, the amount of money one wishes to invest into moving (and as part of this, whether or not to ask for assistance moving from friends and family), what to keep versus what to rid yourself of before the move, how to effectively pack up all belongings, and priorities for your new house.
One must also contend with the viewpoints of all family members involved.
The first issue that should be dealt with is the timing of the move.
When is the best time to move? How many days or hours do you have to devote to the process of moving? After answering these questions, the issue of cost should be dealt with.
What are you willing and not willing to invest? Do you wish to pay movers or ask for help from family and friends? Is time and convenience or money more important to you regarding the move? After you have the issues of timing and cost figured out, then you should deal with the details behind moving.
Moving is a great time to go through belongings and evaluate what should be kept versus gotten rid of.
It is really the only time that an individual must go through all of their belongings anyway.
When planning your move, try to categorize belongings into four groups: what to keep, what to sell, what to donate and what to throw away.
Try to sell or donate as many of your unwanted goods as you can before throwing the rest away.
Once you know what you are keeping and moving to your new house, then begins the packing process.
Start this process as early as possible to try to keep stress levels to a minimum as your move gets closer.
Pack all non-essential items well before your move is to occur.
If you have a spare room or a garage that you can use to store these boxes, it helps to stop you from feeling as if your move is taking over your current home.
Once it's a week before your move, you should only have essential items such as a week's worth of clothing, cooking utensils, etc.
left unpacked.
Items such as paper plates and plastic silverware really come in handy during this week.
Finally, it also helps to consider your new living situation before your move.
Think about where you wish to place items in your new house (and pack accordingly), what you might need to buy once you move, etc.
Take care of any of this before the move as well.
Also make sure to take into consideration the feelings of all parties involved: children, spouse, animals that you have, so that issues can be dealt with as early as possible.
Combined, these strategies will help to make a move into a new house fun and enjoyable.
Happy moving!