Moving house is not exciting for everyone. In fact, as a professional organiser at A Hand to Help I see the stress of moving house firsthand. Yet, I was so excited about the whole process when I moved house recently (to be fair I had lots of warning about this move, so it wasn’t a rushed process). Hello, I’m Kate and maybe it was just the professional organiser in me. I literally had to restrain myself from starting to pack too soon. So when I did start, you can imagine how much I loved it!
I really enjoyed the process of packing all our possessions up and thinking of the memories of my home and the items I was packing away. I enjoyed this process as much as I loved finding new places for them in our new house. I loved setting up the children’s rooms, sorting my new linen cupboard and finding homes for our belongings.
Two moving house tips:
- Pace yourself and do small chunks at a time.
I wanted it all done immediately, but quickly realised it was going to take longer than I imagined. Wouldn’t you know, this is exactly what we tell our clients. Spreading the unpacking across smaller spurts of work is OK! - Label what is inside a box on all four sides and on the top. This may seem like overkill and when you’re busy moving house this can take time. But believe me, this is time well spent. I cannot tell you the number of times that this process saved me when unpacking.
Our boxes were stacked in one room. With the boxes being labelled on all four sides and the top it meant that no matter what angle we looked at our boxes from we could easily see the label and what was in them.
Here are more “how to label your moving boxes” ideas
My biggest moving house struggle:
I want to share with you my biggest struggle; the pantry!! Yep, you heard that right, me a professional organiser had a pantry in complete disarray for a few weeks. I just couldn’t get my head around it. Although my old pantry was not huge it had a great system in place. It worked for our family and I knew exactly where items were and how to put them away.
On move day I quickly threw items into the pantry and then got stuck. So, I moved onto another box. I was actively procrastinating. A couple of days later I even convinced my mum she should do it because it was still too hard for me. Well after mum declared it too tricky, she moved onto a different box too. We were defeated by a pantry, maybe it was time to change careers.
So, there it sat for a few more days until one day I thought “it has to be done!”
I got back to basics. I got my trusty trestle table out I use with clients and pulled everything out of the pantry to start again. Bit by bit I got there. I grouped categories together and carefully selected each new category’s new home in our pantry. I was not after an insta worthy pantry. I was after a functional pantry and now I have it. Several weeks on it is still working for us. So in summary, if you are moving house pace yourself, do small chunks and have some help from family or friends. Be kind to yourself and take your time to ponder a solution when a tricky storage question arises. And remember, you’re not alone. We are here to help. You may like to visit our resources page for some free help or call us. Happy house moving.
