Easy Move {Discover}

Moving is an adventure, a road and mind trip, a rediscovery of one’s environment and own life, a launch into the unknown - for the better, one hopes. It is a complex, layered process that can be stressful, tiresome, exhilarating, motivating and rejuvenating.

Yes, all of this and much more too!

That’s in the ideal world, where good and evil may seem to be quite balanced - a pinch of the latter, a touch of the former.

In practice, it can be quite an ordeal people from different horizons start warning you about the moment you mention the moving project: watch your mental health, be careful with your back when moving furniture around, plan ahead, your kids need to adapt, do not stress, watch your belongings, etc.

Since we just went through a short distance move, I thought it may be useful to share the experience and thoughts with you; ideally, this post is to make your life easier, avoiding the pitfalls we fell into (what else?); truth be told, it may also be a way for me to make our settling down official… A little bit of both, most probably.

1 - Plan ahead

This is what we did not do for several cumbersome reasons I am not going to detail here; we had to find movers at the last minute. How to find them? If you can move via your company, that’s of course the easiest option. If not, I would start by asking friends and family for feedback about their moving experience. Try asking Twitter as well: I find long-term contacts on Twitter are a good source of valuable information. If you belong to a Facebook group, a sports club, a women’s network, think about turning to them for advice and feedback. If, like us, you end up picking a moving company from the Internet at the last minute, do check that they are duly registered and that the testimonials of previous customers are positive. 

2 - Packing

As soon as we had found the right moving company, we asked them to drop a lot of cardboard boxes at our place to start packing while the girls were away. Check with the company and read the contract very carefully to make sure you are packing the right things and are not wasting time packing the items they will have to pack in the end. Double work for you and that’s not the point at all. Clothes very often travel in special boxes, so you may leave those to them, for example. Simple tip: buy a black felt marker (large tip) for each adult involved in the packing process to write what the box contains and where it should go once at the final destination; I would advise doing this even though today boxes come with a printed checklist of rooms. Writing on all sides and especially on the top of the cardboard box makes its contents visible from all angles. To work faster, instead of spelling out the name of each room, we number coded them. This means that once arrived, our boxes were placed in the right room by the movers and the lost sheep eventually found their way to the right spot.

3 - Sort out

Moving can be a healing process: that’s when you can literally leave behind what you do not wish to drag along your life anymore, turn the page, open up new possibilities, rethink your processes and approach to life. This applies also to everyday items: sort out your books, clothes, notebooks, pen collection, shells and whatnot. Think about all the toys, CDs, clothes unused over the past  year - that’s my limit - and find out how to get rid of them in a constructive way. I gave the girls’ clothes and toys to Emmaüs and the local association helping single women and their children. Check if there’s an orphanage next to where you live, an immigrants’ center and other similar structures in need of help. Basically, this is a good opportunity to shed your old skin and jump on the living-with-less train.

4 - Letter templates

List all the administrative companies you need to contact to announce your move: tax center, banks, post office, insurance etc. I have made a single template where only a few lines need to be adapted each time. In one go to the post office I have sent all of them AND asked for the post to be forwarded to my new address. Be careful though: it took longer than announced for the post office to activate the forwarding service, so some letters got sent back to the sender in my case or simply lost…  This can only mean trouble. Life would be boring otherwise. I have another template I use to terminate all ongoing contracts such as electricity, gas, landline etc.

5 - Kids: you are not alone

A special word about small children: we started speaking about moving months before it actually happened and even though we were not sure about moving at all. We did this using books, reading bedtime stories as usual. I found it is the best way to bring on new topics gradually and in a playful way. The plot of the story - with lovely Tchoupi - shifted as our project became clearer. I also had the chance of having the support of friends who gave my daughters books about moving, making new friends and attending a new school. When we received the empty boxes, I put a couple of them aside for the kids to play with - they make great hideouts - and then fill with toys. They did it themselves, throwing in toys as we were preparing to leave. They accepted the process as a game involving the entire family; the clan was to move undivided. The underlying message is: nobody is left behind, everyone participates in the process and enjoys it too. Once at destination, the kids have opened their own boxes: the happiness on their faces seing that their precious dolls and horses had arrived sent ripples of joy through our minds. FaceTime and the likes are helfpul tools to keep in touch with friends: I though my eldest would soon move on to her new friends, but the two years she spent in her previous school have been meaningful - thankfully! We regularly plan video sessions with her little friends and she is happy about it (no crying afterwards, yay!).

6 - Networking

Going downstream in the process, I have found it extremely useful to try and think about the contacts in the city of our final destination. Having a human contact and an insider is a wonderful way to gain insight into the real life in our new geographical area, its culture, language and habits. I have the chance of belonging to a wonderful group of women spread around the world via the Hub Dot network. The first reaction for me is therefore to leverage the online feedback of fellow women who’ve moved before me in the same spot. I strongly encourage you to do the same: online communities flourish and exchanging experiences and information has never been so easy.

These are the few ideas I can think of after having spent a month in our new house and turning it slowly back into a home where every single family member has found sufficient space to breathe. No matter how many tips I may add to the list above, it is the human factor that comes first: home is wherever family is. The contrary would never even cross my mind. So, who cares if there are still a few boxes strewn here and there…? Who cares if the process has been rocky...? We're here after having learned from our mistakes and successes. We're here, yes!

Credits: Death to the Stock Photo (edited by TheDaydreamer)