Once you’ve moved out of your student home and found somewhere pleasant to settle down and accumulate the stuff that make up the domestic leg of the journey of life trying to pull up roots can be a real ordeal. Here are our top tips on making the experience as stress-free as possible.
Who to inform
The most tedious element of moving house is going through your bills and making sure all the relevant parties know that you’re moving, and if necessary where to. The most important venues are your bank, the providers of your credit cards and loyalty cards for supermarkets and the like, your insurance providers, the local council for tax purposes, and where necessary your estate agents, school, and TV and internet providers.
There are a number of websites, including iammoving.com, which can inform a large number of businesses and offices about you move and give you a checklist to keep things in order.
Downsize
Make sure you’re not taking more stuff than is absolutely necessary. If you’ve been in the same place for a long time you may be surprised by just how much stuff you can accumulate. Most charity shops are always looking for more stock, so look through your books, CDs, DVDs and clothes and be ruthless about what you really need to keep. Those books and shirts you haven’t seen in years and forgot you had? You’ve already demonstrated that you can live without them. Maybe there’s someone out there who can give them a happy home?
For larger items, there are plenty of outlets for turning your junk into treasure: if you’re looking to move things nearby, gumtree.com is a great place to sell your electronics, while eBay and its ilk are more consistently reliable than ever.
Moving
Now the fun begins. Hiring a removal company can be expensive, but if you have a lot of possessions to move, particularly furniture, it’s best for everyone if you get the professionals in. They have done this a hundred times before, and putting them under pressure to do things your way is unlikely to yield positive results. Treat them well and they’ll reciprocate! Bear in mind that removal firms are busiest on Fridays and bank holidays; although getting time off work can be troublesome, making the move mid-week is by far the cheapest option.
If you live the Spartan lifestyle you can always just hire a van and make an afternoon of it. Get a bunch of your pals together to carry your stuff around, poke about in your old photo albums, pick up some stuff they might like from your boxes marked ‘Charity Shop’, and all for the price of a couple extra-large pizzas.
Finally, be sure to make a checklist of everything you have put in boxes, as well as all the credit cards, loyalty cards and billing addresses you’ll need to change. As with so many things in life, preparation is the key to success; the further ahead you start planning, the less stress you’ll face on the big day.
Catherine Halsey is based in Edinburgh and writes for a digital marketing agency. This article links back to Barclaycard.