Can it really be possible to take the stress out of moving home? Possibly not all of it, but with a little planning you can certainly reduce the hassles often involved in the actual move day. Like many things in life, events that run smoothly are often the result of good planning. The old saying ‘fail to plan – plan to fail’ is so often true. While many people spend ages looking for their new home, the process of physically moving all your belongings should not be left to a handful of removal people on day you get the key to your new place.

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The best start point is to sort through your possessions several weeks before. Moving house is a great opportunity to decide what needs to go with you and what can be thrown out, donated to charity or sold on eBay etc. It’s also a good idea to start making a few lists of the valuables you may have. Think about the rooms of you new house and decide in advance where items are destined for; especially the large ones. If you can get hold of a floor plan and room sizes of you new house, it’ll give you opportunity to roughly gauge if your bigger items will fit. You will no doubt need to adjust things once you have moved in but getting a feel for where things will go means you can label up boxes and big items with the name of the room you feel they’ll will suit best. Don’t forget the loft, garage and shed. These are places you’ll have put things you couldn’t bring yourself the throw out years ago. If you’ve lived in the same house for a number of years the amount of unused things you’ll have collected may be considerable. If you new house is larger than you old one don’t make the mistake of taking everything with you. Go though the clean out process and take the opportunity to start afresh. Obviously if your new house is smaller you definitely need to reduce what you take.

Next it’s time to get to know your local shop keeper. You’ll need lots of boxes and shops are one of the best places to find them for free. Your removals company (if you use one) may well supply boxes and packing material to you; so it’s worth checking. However you obtain them, get them early. Start filling them up with the kind of things you are not likely to need for a while. Think about the things you use every day and leave them until last. Can you image packing up the TV and doing without it for two weeks? If you are putting your belongings into storage it helps heaps to have things labelled. They’ll nearly always be things you need to retrieve from the storage company especially if the time-span to getting you new place sorted drags on. Six months in and you need your summer clothes which you thought would be hanging in your new house by now. Fishing though tightly packed container units can be a real struggle.