There is no avoiding the fact that moving house is a stressful time. From making a checklist to ensure nothing is missed, to protecting your valuables, and avoiding hidden costs, there is a lot to consider.
Once the move itself is complete, you’re likely to be exhausted and mentally ready to settle in, but the process of unpacking your possessions and getting your house in order may be the most daunting task yet.
Luckily for you, we’ve done this quite a few times, and we’ve put together some simple tips to make this final stretch smooth and problem free:
Focus on One Room at a Time
Chances are your boxes are mainly themed around rooms. Even if you didn’t plan it this way from the start, boxes are typically packed together full of contents from a similar location for convenience purposes.
Unpacking room by room will allow you to move all of the relevant boxes to a room, unpack them, and put things away neatly before moving onto the next room. This makes it much easier to keep track of what you’re doing and to notice if something is missing.
Unpacking the boxes at random and focusing on all rooms at once will just make the job more complicated, force you to make many more trips back and forth, and increase the chance things will be missed or misplaced.
Set up a Survival Station
In our moving house checklist, we mentioned the importance of a “moving house survival station”. This simply refers to keeping everything you’ll need for the day in one place - tea, milk, sugar, snacks and biscuits, assembly tools, toilet paper, soap, phone chargers, movies etc. This ensures that you have everything you need in one place. Failure to do this could mean you get to the end of the day, and realise you still need to dig out all of the things you need for the evening - something will only increase stress!
If you’re setting up such a survival station, do it first, and keep it in one separate area of the house, so you have everything you need going forward.
Focus on Important Things First
It’s important to focus on the largest, and most important items first. Large items like furniture, televisions, etc will make the task of unpacking everything seem much larger, and they are also usually the focal point of a room. Arranging these things first will quickly reduce the overall volume of the items you need to organise, and also allows you to ensure they are in their optimal spots before adding smaller items.
While it may be tempting to just open the nearest box and start putting away whatever small items it contains, you may later find you need to unpack something larger and find space is limited due to the smaller items that have already been placed everywhere. This may necessitate moving them again which can only increase both workload and stress.
Once all of your furniture and large appliances are in place and you have the basic structure of each room, however, organising everything else around them will become much easier.
Solve the Kitchen Early
Having no kitchen available can be a stressful situation, especially if you’re getting hungry or it’s time for a quick coffee break. This point also ties into the previous one, as your kitchen likely contains a fridge, dishwasher, and multiple other large appliances.
Getting these things sorted first means a lot of the heavy lifting is done already and means snacks and drinks are always available throughout the remainder of the process.
This doesn’t mean the entire kitchen needs to be unpacked before moving onto other rooms (saucepans and juicers may be lower priority for example), but getting the most fundamental parts of the kitchen into place early will keep things running smoothly.
Move onto Bathrooms & Bedrooms Next
Unless you have multiple large bathrooms, the bathroom will usually be the easiest room to unpack, with the only significant items being relatively small (think towels, soap, shampoo, toothbrushes, toilet paper etc). However, getting this done first means everybody is accommodated for toilet facilities and you’ll also appreciate it when it comes time to shower at the end of the day!
The bedroom is likely to be a larger task, but getting to the end of the day and realising you haven’t assembled the beds isn’t going to help your stress levels. Get that done early, make the beds too, and add any things that will affect your ability to feel comfortable. The rest can be added afterwards. If you have kids, do their bedroom before yours too - as you are likely to want them to get to bed at a reasonable time!
Settle on a Final Layout
Once the main rooms are complete, focus on any bulky pieces of furniture that remain. Laying these out correctly will not only make it easier to add smaller decorative pieces afterwards, but will also mean the bulk of the heavy work is complete, meaning smaller things can be easily delayed until tomorrow if time is running out.
If you’re using a professional removal company, ensure they put such items in the exact place you want them - the last thing you want is for them to drop things in the wrong place and then leave, leaving you to drag things around all evening.
Once the final layout is complete, your new home will likely be mostly livable, and you can continue unpacking smaller items like blankets, wall paintings, curtains, rugs etc at your own leisure if time permits, or delay this until tomorrow if time is running low already, leaving you in a relatively stress free position. It may just be time to settle down for dinner in front of the TV to enjoy your new home!
How Can phs Teacrate Help?
phs Teacrate is the UK’s favourite supplier of hire crates for moving house, removal crate bundles, and other forms of heavy duty, bulk packaging.
Moving over 9 million crates every year and supporting industries such as removals and storage, food processing and distribution, pharmaceuticals, education, automotive industries, retail and fit out companies, we are the market leading crate rental service provider across the UK.
We’re in every geographical area and because we’re next door, everywhere, we are on hand to help wherever you are. With over 100 operational staff and a fleet of 29 vehicles, next working day delivery is available on all stocked items through our national network of depots, conveniently located throughout the UK, which also cater for customer collections at all locations.
Our unique bar coding technology has been designed to assist in the tracking of your products from the initial delivery right through to the final collection. Backed up with numerous management reporting now available, the tracking of your crates couldn’t be simpler.
To learn more about our services and products or to discuss your own requirements, feel free to contact us now!