While many people look forward to moving to a new place, it can also get quite stressful during the days leading up to the move. There are always plenty of important things to remember and often an enormous amount of planning to do. If you are moving relatively far afield, it can even become quite nerve-racking, particularly when you have to say goodbye to friends and family back home. However, ensuring that you prepare everything comfortably far in advance will make things much easier. The following tips will help you to make sure that your move goes as smoothly as possible.
Organizing Your Utilities and Services
Many of us rely on a large number of utilities and services including gas, electricity, water, telephone line rental, Internet and television services. Transferring your existing services to a new address takes time, even if it doesn’t take a great deal of effort on your part. Be sure to alert your service and utility providers several weeks in advance to ensure that you have everything set up when you move in to the new place, or preferably before. You will also spend less on your utilities this way, since you will be able to avoid spending a lot more on deemed contracts for your energy supplies, or worse, ending up having your housewarming party in the dark.
Change Your Address for Other Services
Whether it is online banking or an online shop that you use frequently, changing your address for any such services in advance will help to ensure that you don’t end up getting mail and other things shipped to your old address after you have moved house. The new occupants of your house will also be much happier not to have to forward your utility bills, bank statements and the plethora of other things that they might receive in the post. Log into your online accounts and change your address on each one a few days before moving house. It shouldn’t take much time, but it will be one less thing to think about once you have made the move.
Make an Inventory of Your Items
This is something that you might want to consider doing while you are packing everything up. Before you do this, however, determine what your new home already has (if anything). Make an inventory of all of your items and categorize them by room or item type. You can create a spreadsheet or use a special application designed precisely for the purpose, or you can simply write everything down by hand. At the same time, make a list of any additional items that you need to purchase for your new home.
Ensure You Have Plenty of Packaging
It is not likely that you will ever end up with too many bags and boxes for putting all of your household items in. Ensure that you have all of the packaging that you are likely to need, and preferably some excess, several days before you need to start packing everything up. There is absolutely no need to pay for things like boxes and bags either. To get boxes, you should be able to pick up as many as you need at your local grocery store or supermarket. They will usually have a huge excess which they will likely give away for free rather than throw away. Just ensure that you have some stronger boxes for heavier items such as kitchenware and books.
Label Everything Clearly
As a removalists company located on the Gold Coast, we can not stress how important this is. You will probably end up with a multitude of boxes filled with everything from books to toiletries. To make it much easier to keep track of everything, ensure that every box is clearly labelled. Another great way to clearly display which boxes are going where is to use coloured tape with a different colour for each room of the new house.
Get Rid of Everything You Don’t Need
This is ideally the first thing that you should do when preparing for the big day. Whether you are moving locally on the Gold Coast or Interstate from the Gold Coast to Melbourne or the Gold Coast to Sydney, there is no point in taking a whole lot of things that you no longer use to your new place. Clearing out your loft and cupboards filled with things like old clothes and other items that you no longer have any use for should ideally be done long before you start packing the items you want to take with you. Having a car boot sale or auctioning off your unwanted items on eBay a few weeks before moving means that you’ll have a lot less to carry, pack and unpack when it comes to moving.
Get to Know the New Area
After an undoubtedly rather stressful and busy day of moving house, you will likely be in the mood for a few afternoon or evening refreshments, or perhaps you would like to meet the neighbours or learn where the local shop is. Take a look at your new neighbourhood on Google Street View You will feel much more comfortable in the days shortly after you move into your new place if you are already somewhat familiar with the area. With the Internet providing a huge amount of information in many such cases, there’s really no reason not to. If you are moving from interstate to the Gold Coast we can tell you now, what a great decision.
