Moving into a bigger home can be a really exciting venture, but it can also be stressful. In this guide, we’ll review four tips for moving into a bigger home to help you create and execute a plan to make this as pain-free as possible.
1. Make stylistic choices BEFORE the move
Moving into a bigger space has a couple of implications, from having enough room for the things that are crammed into your current living arrangement to buying additional items to decorate in a new way.
Whether you are going for a minimalist look or a zen design, you’ll want to decide loosely on the type of style you’re aiming for before beginning the moving process. This will allow you to preemptively go through your belongings and donate anything that doesn’t match the design plans you have for your new space.
The less you have to transfer, the better, so this stage can play a huge role in determining how much packing and unpacking you’ll be doing versus how much you’ll be paying for new furniture and home goods. It’s best to find some sort of balance that works for you!
2. Pick a moving service that works for you
So, moving day is coming up; you’ve organized your ‘keep’ and ‘donate’ piles and sought to maintain anything that brings you joy. Now, how do you actually get everything to your new home?
There are a couple of options; the first and least desirable is packing up your own car or renting a small moving van and making multiple trips to the new home. This is super inefficient and exhausting.
Another option is to hire people to do the packing and moving for you, but this gets pricey really quickly—and you’d probably benefit from a slightly more cost-effective route.
A wonderful middle-ground option is hiring moving services that will provide you with a container to pack up everything over the course of a week or more. Then, they’ll pick it up and transfer it to wherever it needs to go once the moving day has officially arrived.
3. Make decisions about storage
So, all your stuff is in your new home; any excitement you feel here can lead you to bypass the crucial step of creating an organizational system. Before you get to designing and decorating, you need to lay the groundwork for a spacious and organized home by creating systems for accessible and functional storage.
Some of the key spaces and rooms where organization comes into play are clothing, linen closets, kitchen pantry and cupboards, bathrooms, and garages. Each room will have it’s own storage needs or opportunities, but by utilizing storage containers and organizers, you’ll get a sense of what will naturally fit into the pre-existing spaces and what you may need to add (i.e., rooms that need an extra set of drawers or bathrooms in need of shelves). These are important details to hash out before you step into the designing phase.
4. Decide on design and decorations
Everything is organized, you’ve got an idea of any required furniture items that’ll go into storage, and you’ve already started thinking about your designing ideas. That said, now is the time to evaluate each segment or room in your new home and figure out which spaces will be a combination of pieces from your old home and new items and which spaces you’ll be re-decorating from scratch.
Regardless of your decorating style, some things are always true: your bed should be comfortable and have good linens and supportive pillows, your art and photos should reflect your taste and the things that matter to you, and rugs can instantly transform a space. Take some time as you nest into your big new home and think carefully about what pieces you can decorate with.
So there you have it, four tips for the four phases of moving into a bigger home. Good luck with your move, and remember to take the necessary steps to make your move easier and more efficient at every step of the process!