How to Make Moving to a New Home Easier

Moving is a disorienting experience. It’s pulling your life up by the roots, which impacts your sense of identity and purpose. Systematically deconstructing your life in order to transport it to a new location brings up all sorts of emotions. When packing, you stumble upon things that evoke memories, discover forgotten letters and find precious artifacts that you had thought you had lost forever.

As you sift and sort through your stuff, you inevitably reflect on good and bad experiences. Before you know it, you start asking yourself existential questions. “Who am I?” “Why am I here?” “Where am I going?” “Is it working out yet?”

Moving is also physically exhausting. Sometimes you have to pack while you still have a full-time job, which means that you have to spend long hours packing after you come home from work. Besides coping with exhaustion, as well as sleep deprivation, you also have to do a lot of things in a short amount of time in order to meet impending moving deadlines.

So, what are some of the things that you can do to make moving an easier process? Let’s take a brief look at what you can do before you leave your old home and what you should do when you get to your new home.

Leaving Your Old Home

One thing you might do to make life much, much easier is to hire a professional moving company. A company like North American Van Lines provides more than just a truck to help you move from point A to point B. They can help with all sorts of other things. When it comes to packing, for example, you can opt for their full-service packing, get assistance with self-packing or just get help with packing fragile things. You also don’t have to recruit family and friends to help you take apart furniture and appliances and put it together again at your final destination — as they do this for you, too. In addition, professional movers do the heavy lifting involved with loading and unloading.

If a professional moving company can provide the trucks, equipment, manpower, resources, and knowledge you need to move, why do people prefer to take the DIY route? It’s usually because they are under the impression that they can do it cheaper, can count on their family and friends to help them out, and can figure out all the details of what to do and how to do it as they muddle along. In many cases, this is not true. Miscellaneous costs add to a point where a DIY move ends up costing more. And while family and friends are often willing to help, they often have their own busy work schedules that limit how much time they have available to help you out.

The only time a DIY move might work out is if

1. you don’t have much stuff;
2. you have more than enough time to do everything yourself; and
3. it’s a local move.

For long distance moves where you have a lot of stuff and not that much time to get everything organized, the more help you can get, the easier everything will be.

Arriving At Your New Home

Moving, of course, doesn’t end after you leave your old home and arrive at your new one. You now have to unpack and get organized.

Here are 5 tips to make the whole process of unpacking and settling in easier and faster:

1. If you need to clean your new house, then do this before you unpack your boxes.
2. If you didn’t label your boxes, then take a peek at what you have in your boxes to get some idea of what’s in each box.
3. Unpack all your essential things first—which is usually stuff for the kitchen, bathroom, and bedroom. You can then take your time when it comes to the rest of the house.
4. Plan out how you want your rooms to look before you unpack the rest of your boxes and assemble the furniture. This will make it easier to get your dining room, living room, bedrooms, and home office organized the way you’d like.
5. Once you’ve made yourself comfortable, then go out and explore your neighborhood, make friends, and get to know your surroundings, your local stores, and your immediate geography. In other words, make yourself at home!

Final Reflections

Many people say that the process of moving house is just as stressful as starting a new job or ending a long-term relationship. This is true; however, after you deconstruct your life, you also have an opportunity to reconstruct it, starting everything anew in your new place.

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