Moving Lessons from a Professional Organizing
As I write this blog, I’m surrounded by boxes and I’m just over a week away from my second home move in the last six years. I never dreamed my husband and I would end up moving twice in our 50s. Back in 2020, we thought we were remodeling and moving to our forever home. While we have loved living here for many reasons, we are thrilled to be moving closer to our adult children and our parents. ALL our family is in the south and we miss them. But right this second, in the midst of this move, I can’t help but think about the process of moving, how awful it is even for professionals, what techniques actually helped and what I could have done better.
Moving is considered one of life’s biggest stressors. I should know as I’ve helped many, many people move and no one has ever told me that they loved moving. Even when we are moving for happy reasons, moving means a million decisions, weeks of work, and big dollars in expense. While I love organizing moves for clients, I have to admit that it’s different when it’s your move, your family, your stuff. When it’s your own move, you are not just managing the move as a project. You are processing emotions when decluttering and saying goodbye to friends and neighbors, all while handling countless tasks including the financial and legal details of buying and selling homes.
In short, it’s a lot to manage and there is not a lot of advice that really applies to moving later in life. Most of the tips I read seem to be more geared for apartment moves or moves for younger families. If you are a little further along in life, with several decades of stuff to sort through, here is some real advice from a professional who is currently walking her talk!
Things that I would do better in this or the next move…
Organize and protect my digital life well before the move
In my last move, I was running to Best Buy for a portable hard drive to back up my computer at the last possible second. Computers and hard drives are delicate things so I was rightly concerned about my electronics working after going in a box and rattling around in a truck. It’s always a best practice to back up your data, but never more important than before moving! I had a client once tell me they backed up their data and then destroyed an older computer before a move. After the move, they tried to pull photos from the portable drive but the drive failed, resulting in the loss of years of family photos. Just retelling the story caused the client to break down in tears.
As awful as that story is, it’s not uncommon. In fact, the annualized failure rate for a hard drive is about 1.5 - 2%, and the typical life of an external hard drive is around 3-5 years. I share these statistics as a reminder to not trust just one device. The best way to save and preserve your data is to use the 3-2-1 rule which means to keep 3 copies of important data and photos on 2 different media types with one copy offsite. If you haven’t done these tasks in a while, please know that this work can take hours if not days, and is best not done at the last minute when you are already stressed to the max.
This move, I’ll confess that my digital photo backups are solid but I did spend about 10 hours organizing and scanning physical photos that I had been meaning to scan for years but never got around to. My advice is to organize, digitize, and backup anything that you would be devastated to lose whether moving or not.
Don’t try to do everything yourself when moving
Our last move was during the pandemic and I was hesitant to have a lot of different people in the home as we have medical conditions that put us at higher risk. Looking back, I did all the landscaping, staging, cleaning, and most of the packing myself. If my college-age kids had not been home during the pandemic and willing to help, I’m not sure I would have survived the experience. My daughter is still laughing about her first experience driving a U-Haul truck!
Life is full of lessons and my biggest tip is to brainstorm a list of tasks that need to be done. Then go back through that list looking for opportunities to delegate to a professional or to family and friends who offer to help. Remember, even a small task can be a sanity saver. For example, having a friend pick up drinks and a lunch order for the movers saves you precious time on move day. For this move, I hired a painter, pressure washer, junk hauler, and movers and packers to help me get my home on the market in seven days, allowing us to sell our house much faster than if I had tried to do all the work myself.
Allow extra time for potted plants, propane tanks, and household chemicals
Please don’t assume the new home buyer wants these things or that your movers will allow them on the truck. I learned this lesson the hard way on my 2020 move. I had large planters by the deck in full bloom, and I knew they would be a bear to move, so I left them for the new home owners. The new home owners didn’t love them like I assumed and asked us to remove them. I was lucky they were gracious and that all I had to do was drive 30 minutes over with a teen son who was less than happy to be voluntold to assist with yet another moving task. If I had been further away, my only recourse would have been to hire a junk hauler.
This move, I made sure to plan ahead and look for solutions. I sent photos of my large containers to my realtor and asked that he check with the buyer to see if they are interested.. They want the biggest ones, and my neighbor will take any remaining pots and planters. I’m taking a few favorite containers with me but I emptied and cleaned them 2 weeks before the move because I learned my lesson!
Other tasks I took care of early were returning propane tanks, cleaning out my freezer, and disposing of household chemicals. These tasks take time to do and you just don’t have any spare time the last two weeks before moving.
Things that helped me save time and money while moving
Pack and move items to storage, then stage your home
Pack as much as you can and store it before you market your home. Staging a home can mean a lot of things but the bottom line is you want a potential buyer to walk in your home and see their family living there and not see just your stuff. Making rooms, closets, and cabinets look larger is going to help sell your home. My rule of thumb is pack everything that I won’t need or use in the next 3-6 months and I move these items to storage. My house feels larger, it’s easier to keep tidy during the showing process, and I’ve given myself a head start on the packing. I’ll spend about $300 in storage fees but our house was under contract in the first week so that’s money well spent. To make it easier to keep up with what’s in storage, photograph things before you pack them and take photos of the storage unit as you move boxes in. There will always be something that you will need to go back and find in your storage unit and those photos will save you a headache.
Measure furniture and complete a floorplan for every room in the new home
During our last move, our house was under construction months past the expected finish date. Because we couldn’t move directly into our home, we moved a lot of things into storage only to later learn they didn’t really work in the new house. For this move, I used the same OrganizeWell move management process I use with my clients. I took photos and measurements of every piece of furniture I own and I placed them on the floorplan of the new house. I was fortunate to fly down to Texas and measured the footprint of each piece of furniture, marking the location with blue tape. This is great for those of us who need to ‘see’ the placement of furniture to make sure rooms will function well. My floorplan and blue tape will then serve as a guide for the moving team on move-in day, saving me a ton of time and questions on an already busy day.
Pro tip - create labels for the furniture for the movers to add after the furniture is wrapped and protected. Labels allow the movers to carry the furniture into the correct location and then unwrap it.
Sell what’s worth selling and let go of the rest
I believe moving really changes for people in their fifties and older. At this point in life, we have lived through some major life experiences and have the belongings to show for it. The things in our home may reflect who we used to be as much as who we are now or are becoming. Our homes may contain items we were using in our 30’s and 40’s, along with the things our kids left with us and the items we have inherited or been gifted from previous generations. Even if you are moving to similar or larger homes, I can almost guarantee there will be a substantial number of things to be decluttered if you’re older than 50. My most earnest advice is to donate, recycle, or toss the bulk of these things rather than trying to sell them. The real value to be gained is not only a potential sale price. It’s saving the money and the time from not having to pack, move, and unpack items that will only make our new homes less organized.
I’ve also learned that the items we consider to be valuable may no longer have a market. That doesn’t mean you can’t make a little money. In both moves, I’ve made around $2000 - $3000 selling things on FB marketplace in the months prior to the move. My advice is to post 3-5 things at a time to see what sells quickly. For example, I've learned that no one is interested in the set of antique skis that look amazing on the front porch at Christmas - no interest at all! However, the 4 year old pressure washer generated over 20 inquiries in the first night and I sold it the next day. I’ve had the best luck with gardening and sports equipment and very little luck selling ‘decor’.
To sum it up, moving can be exhausting and overwhelming, even for people who do it professionally. But it is made easier when we focus on knocking out time consuming tasks well before the move, looking for opportunities to delegate so we conserve our own resources, and by being ruthlessly realistic about what is worth moving and letting go of the possessions that no longer serve us. I donated my roller blades before this move. Mind you, I haven’t actually been rollerblading in a decade but I did move them to this house in 2020, where they just became clutter for six years. Moving twice in my 50’s has certainly taught me to be ruthlessly realistic about what I actually need, love and use and I hope my advice makes your next move less overwhelming.