Blog - Page 9 of 9 - HouseRemoval.com

I don’t need to tell you that moving house is a stressful business but there are many ways to ease that stress a little bit that will help you stay calmer in the run-up to the “big day” and also on moving day itself. They will help you to keep calm and stay focused on the task at hand – and before you know it you will be sitting back in your new home with your feet up!

One of the reasons that moving home is so stressful is that there are so many things to think about and it all happens in quite a short time frame, with so many opportunities for things to go wrong. Buyers pull out of the sale, sellers decide not to move after all, you lose your job just before contacts are signed – these things all happen, if not on a regular basis certainly often enough for us to worry about them.

Yet it can also seem like one minute you’re casually browsing through RightMove looking at properties in your price bracket and in your preferred locations, and the next you’re getting things down from the loft and packing up boxes – well, I know, not all house moves happen smoothly and quickly but many do and once the ball is rolling it can feel like the whole process is out of your control.

If you are lucky enough to be able to afford to have a removals company like DS Carriers Glasgow come in and do all the packing for you that can certainly relieve some of the stress but with all the other costs of moving home most of us try to save money by packing our boxes ourselves. There are advantages and disadvantages with both approaches.

Packing Your Own Boxes:

This will give you the opportunity to declutter, because moving home is often the only time we ever really have a good clear out of all those things we have been hoarding. It’s much harder to do this if the removers are packing for you – they will just pack everything, including, as I found out on my last house move, my office wastepaper basket along with all the rubbish in it!
You can start in advance – placing packed boxes in your garage (if you have one) or in low-cost storage. It really will help you be more organised! I found this brilliant price comparison chart for self-storage companies that helped me find the right one for me.
It will save you money – although not always as much as you would think so make sure you do your sums.

Having The Removers Pack The Boxes

Removals companies are experts at packing fragile or awkwardly shaped items so there is far less chance of anything getting broken or damaged if you let them do the packing. They will arrive with all the boxes and packing materials needed such as paper sheets for wrapping china and glass, bubble wrap and strong packing tape so you won’t have to worry about buying it and making sure you have enough. It is very common to underestimate how many boxes you will need for a house move.
Packing boxes takes time when you are not an expert and with all the other things that need organising for a house move having someone else do the packing takes away a huge amount of pressure. I had the removers pack my boxes last time I moved and didn’t regret the cost – I only wish I’d had them pack on previous house moves.

So aside from the packing what are the best and easiest ways to curb the stress of a house move? Here are just a few of my favourite tips:

Make a list of everything you need to remember

A To Do list will be your best friend when it comes to moving house. It is up to you where and how you maintain that list just make sure you have one – be vintage and keep a hand-written list in a notepad, use you smartphone and one of the many to-do apps available, just use a spreadsheet or notes and actions and reminders in Outlook or another email tool.

List will be really helpful to you but you must keep them up to date and that means keeping them with you (or easily accessible) at all times. So when you have booked a date and time for the removers to come and give an estimate of moving costs you won’t forget, and when you have to start packing boxes, you won’t forget; and your lists will help you with budgeting too as you can write down all quotes for comparison and keep track of costs you have already incurred.

Don’t forget to tick off tasks as you go – that’s very satisfying…

Pack Something Every Day

Yep, that’s right every day – it is just too easy to put the task off until tomorrow or the next day or the week-end and before you know it you are faced with a mammoth task. Whereas if you do something every day that mountainous task will gradually diminish with seemingly little effort. Set aside half and hour each day for packing – it is amazing what can be achieved in half and hour and most of us can find that extra time o=in our day if we really want to.

If you leave packing to the last minute there is a much greater chance of items getting damaged in transit because you rushed the job and there is also much more chance of you just packing everything because you haven’t got the time to sort out the clutter from the things you want to keep.

Label EVERYTHING

You really won’t remember what is in that large box with the red star sticker on it – trust me, I’ve been there. Make sure you label every box, bag, suitcase as soon as it is fully packed. It goes without saying (but…) you should keep a separate box for all the essentials and valuables: passports, driving licenses, tea, coffee, kettle, mugs, chocolate, duvets and sheets, clearly labelled, of course.

It may seem tempting to not label everything but that will just make the job of settling into your new home that bit harder. If the boxes are all properly labelled then the removers will know which rooms they belong in.

So every box needs a room label – on all 4 sides – to help out the removers when they are unloading, and a list of what the box contains for your benefit but also so the removers know whether they can stack certain boxes on top of each other. Clearly you don’t want your fragile china and glass in a box at the bottom of a pile of boxes containing heavy items like books or tools.

The more detailed the labels are the easier it will be for everyone.

Take Time Off Work

Don’t add to your stress levels by trying to move house without taking a few days off work – sure you will want to take most of those days after the move to help you get settled in to your new abode but don’t put yourself under unnecessary stress all for the sake of a couple of days off to help you get sorted before the move. If you are stressed at work and worrying about house move issues you won’t be functioning at full capacity anyway

If there is really some work that can’t wait then try and work extra hours well before moving day and get ahead of yourself. Think about putting any work-related deadlines and issues on your list to help plan ahead.

Some house moves can be fraught with glitches so be prepared for last minute dashes to the solicitor to discuss contract issues or time to talk to the estate agents to help keep everything running smoothly.

Set The Moving Date As Soon As Possible

If you are fortunate you may be able to choose the date that suits you best but if you are in a long chain of buyers and sellers, you may have very little choice. Whether the moving date is your ideal date or not, get it firmed up as soon as you possibly can. This will enable you to confirm the date with the movers, inform all the utilities companies of the impending move (gas, electricity, water, phones, internet service provider etc). If you can have all those companies informed well in advance then you have already taken some of the stress off your own shoulders.

If you have children or pets you can also book babysitters or childcare for the day and arrange for friends to look after you pets or book them into kennels or a cattery. Remember your stress can rub off on them so try and stay calm when children and pets are around – expend your frustrations at the gym if you must..

These are just some of my favourite tips to help keep the stress level down when moving house. Serial house movers will probably have plenty more good ideas on how to make a move run smoothly. If you have your own top tip why not share it below in the comments – we always love to hear from people about their moving home stories.

Some good friends of mine have recently moved out of their 3-bed 1970’s chalet bungalow on a neat, if rather uninspiring, estate into a nearby rented house while they are having an extension built and major renovations done to said chalet bungalow. It currently has 2 bedrooms and a family bathroom upstairs under the eaves and another bedroom and shower room downstairs along with a large living/dining room and average-sized kitchen. I say average-sized but, in fact, having been built in the 70’s it’s probably significantly larger than the sort of kitchen you would get in a new build today.

Some reports suggest that kitchens are 30% smaller in new builds now than they were in the 1960’s. A recent visit to a 4-bed new family home makes me think that must be true as the kitchen was tiny and out of all proportion with the rest of the house. There was a master bedroom and en-suite in the loft, 3 fairly small bedrooms and a family bathroom on the first floor and a living room and small kitchen on the ground floor. The living room seemed a fairly decent size but only had living room furniture in it whereas, in practice, you would probably need a dining table in there too as the kitchen was so small – certainly too small to fit in a family sized table. The interior designers who did this particular show home had placed a small round table in the kitchen, but even with the table pushed up against the wall so that 2 of the 4 chairs were inaccessible it looked and felt cramped. And, of course, this limited the amount of space there was available for kitchen cupboards so that house would have the usual new-build problem of simply not enough space and particularly not enough storage space.

Is it just me who expects to see a family home with a full sized dining table at which a family could actually eat a meal and occasionally have visitors over for a meal? I know some other studies have shown that Londoners eat out on average 4 times per week (yes, really) but it would be interesting to know what the figures are for the country as a whole – I’m pretty sure they wouldn’t be anywhere near that many times and definitely not for families. Sadly, I suspect that house developers are contributing to the trend of eating in front of the TV. I’d like to think that the major house developers had done their research and this was what people wanted – tiny kitchens in exchange for more bedrooms and bathrooms but I have to wonder how the buyers of those homes feel after a few months living there. And I suspect it has more to do with the very high cost of land in so many parts of the UK and the desire of developers to squeeze as many homes onto the available space as possible. But that’s just me on my soap box again…

Although I don’t usually carry a tape measure with me my gut feeling is that 70’s houses are larger than current new homes and stand on larger plots. So back to the 70s house recently vacated for 6 months by my good friends.

They are, as I said, having major work done – to preserve the back garden which is not overly large they are, unusually, building their extension at the front and side. The side section will take the place of a narrow, under-used strip of garden and the front section will sit on what is now their fairly large, again under-used front lawn. It makes sense at a practical level but I’m just not convinced it will sit well in the street scape where all the neighbouring houses have large front lawns. But they have planning permission so I’m sure it will look better than I think because I can’t imagine a local authority giving planning permission for something that will look out of place – no, wait, of course I can imagine that – I see examples every day in my small home counties town.

Still I think the transformation of a 3-bed chalet bungalow into a proper 4-bed house will be exciting to see – I do know that the layout will work well and it will end up beautifully designed and decorated, and filled with wonderful furniture, art and objets because my friends have great taste. I envy them being involved in the project – so great will be the transformation that it was close to being just as cost effective to knock the whole thing down and start again – the costs were almost identical but it would have taken longer and the additional rent costs would have pushed them over budget . So a transformation it is, rather than a re-build.

I used to believe that creating a totally different house on a street of identical houses would mean that you would spend more on the transformation than you would ever recoup in the value of the house but I have seen several local streets over the years be completely changed and house prices leap into another bracket altogether by just such a thing happening. Starting with one brave, fore-sighted owner doing exactly what my friends are doing.

Only recently I was reading about The Bishop’s Avenue in London which has seen almost all the original Edwardian houses torn down over the past few decades and successively replaced by larger and larger contemporary homes and the same is happening in many of the wealthier commuter towns surrounding London. In Beaconsfield, for instance, I have seen perfectly decent (in fact, very desirable) substantial 5-bed houses torn down to be replaced by 3-storey mini-mansions with 6 bedrooms and 6 bathrooms – who really needs that many bathrooms? Think of the cleaning – even if you aren’t doing it yourself.

So, on the one hand, we have new home developers building ever smaller so-called “family homes” and at the other end of the scale we have people who think that 5 bedrooms and 2 or 3 bathrooms just isn’t enough space. And this is happening in the same areas – I’m not quite sure what that says for the state of the housing market in the UK but there is a huge chasm growing that may never be crossed.

Easy Moving Home Tips