5 LESSONS LEARNED FROM MOVING

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Guest article by Kim of Balance Junkie

As Kim from Balance Junkie and I each moved this summer, we decided to share our “lessons learned”. Although she moved 3 hours away, and I moved about 10 times that, the process is the same! Please check out my MOVING STINKS-AND I NEVER WANT TO DO IT AGAIN! post at her site after you’re done reading her story.

There are some things you learn best in calm, and some in storm.

~Willa Cather

Well I’ve been writing about our move to a new city ever since the idea came out of the blue about 7 months ago. I worried about taking on a new mortgage just as we had almost paid off the old one. I worried about leaving a home we loved and thought we would never leave. I worried about how our three sons would adjust to new schools, new friends, and a completely new environment.

It’s finally over. We’re here. We’re (mostly) settled. A lot of folks have asked how it went, so I thought I would write a little bit about some of the things I learned from the move.

5 Things I Learned from the Move

1. Sometimes It’s Better to Let the Professionals Handle It

When we looked at whether to move ourselves or hire movers, we found that it would cost at least $4000 to hire a moving company. We would do our own packing, but they would bring a huge truck, load it and unload it for us. If we decided to move ourselves, we would need to use two trucks since none of us is qualified to drive the largest truck. We found that we could move for about half the cost if we did it this way.

Further, we could bridge the two houses so that we could move some of our stuff in on the first move, get some painting done, and then move the rest in on the second move a week later. That’s the route we chose, and it was probably the single worst decision we made surrounding this move.

We accepted offers to help from relatives and hired a couple of our sons’ friends to help with the move. While it was great to have the extra bodies, none of us are professionals and it took forever to load the truck properly so that everything would fit. As it is, we barely fit everything on the two trucks in spite of my Dad’s excellent loading skills. We felt terrible for imposing on our family even though all of them were more than willing to lend a hand.

One of our sixteen year-old sons is still on crutches from his recent surgeries, so he wasn’t able to help. The boys’ friends were helpful, but again, lacked the experience to really save us much time. That brings me to the single best decision we made: We hired a couple of guys through a company we found on Kijiji.

These were professional movers, and we were able to hire them by the hour. They worked about 5 times faster than the rest of us and literally did all the heavy lifting. We only had them at our new destination for both moves, but we wish we had hired some similar professionals to help load the trucks from our original home. We could have saved ourselves a lot of time and aggravation – and the minimal cost would have been well worth it.

2. Get Rid of Unwanted Items Before You Move

I ended up going through some of our closets and getting rid of a lot of stuff after we had trekked it up the highway in trucks that were filled to capacity. Weeding out unwanted or unnecessary items ahead of time would have saved us the time and trouble it took to pack and unpack those things. It would probably have made loading the trucks a little easier too.

3. Moving is a Great Reason to Re-Organize

When you have to empty the contents of your home and relocate it, it presents a rare opportunity to have all of your stuff in front of you and make a call on what is really the best place to put it. Although I failed miserably at getting rid of superfluous items in advance, I was actually pretty good about getting most things organized the way we want them. I still have some work to do in my youngest son’s closet, but I did pretty well organizing the kitchen.

A lot of our helpers just put stuff anywhere there was space in the kitchen, so I went through every drawer and cupboard and organized things in a more thoughtful way. I even went through all of my recipes and got rid of some of the ones I know I’ll never use.

4. Trust Your Instincts

I had a feeling that moving twice and not allowing professionals to do the work might not be a great idea. I should have trusted that instinct, set aside the funds necessary to pay the moving company and made a single clean break rather than prolonging the experience. Maybe part of me didn’t want to let go of our original home and I felt better knowing that it was still ours for a week. Perhaps that’s also the the reason I was less organized than I normally would have been during the packing phase.

5. You Can’t Plan for Everything

As most of us who have lived more than a couple of decades learn – apparently over and over again – you can’t plan for every contingency. We thought that our dual move approach would work out if we planned it just right. But there were – as there always are – many details that we could not have foreseen no matter how diligently we planned.

One of the things I wondered and worried about most was how I would feel about our new home and city. Because we were in a competitive offer situation, we bought the house without knowing much about the area and hoped for the best. I worried that no house would ever feel like home the way our other house had.

In the end, all of my worries proved to be for nothing. We love our new city and neighbourhood. We’ve met some really great people already and we feel very much at home now that all of our stuff is here. Although I miss the relatives we left behind, I don’t miss our other home very much at all. I’m not sure whether it’s because I worked through so much of that in advance or whether it’s just as I suspected in a previous post on How We Sold Our House in 5 Days: Home is more than bricks and mortar. It’s quality time with people you love.

All in all, I learned a lot from the “stormy” aspects of the move, but I’ve only really been able to assimilate it all in the calm that has emerged since most of the boxes have been unpacked. We still have one more hurdle, and that is having our basement finished. We elected to get it done right away since my husband needs an office for work. So for the next 6 or 7 weeks he’s working in the dining room. And that brings me to one final lesson: This too shall pass.

Kim Petch is the writer behind Balance Junkie, where you can read about personal finance, economics and life balance. You can also follow @BalanceJunkie on Twitter.

What are your lessons learned and suggestions when moving?

image credit; enigmabadger