Downsizing Your Home Doesn’t Have To Be Painful
Downsizing Your Home Doesn’t Have To Be Painful
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Two of your kids are already married with children, and the third one moved out six months ago. While you may have enjoyed the space to start with, you may now be thinking about downsizing – moving to somewhere that is a bit more manageable and then putting the money you make on the deal into your retirement fund. Downsizing can be a good idea, but people forget that it is just that – downsizing. You’re not going to have the same amount of space that you did previously, and so you need to take steps to downsize your life and possessions as well.
Photo Credit: Apartment Therapy
You must start preparing for your move well in advance. The first thing to do is to make a list of all of the things that you just can’t give up. Then, o through the list again and tick off all of those things that you use frequently. Those are the things that you know you have to take with you. For the rest, ask yourself whether it might be a good idea to put these in storage. This can be quite inexpensive, especially if you investigate what cheap storage San Diego, Baltimore or Indianapolis can offer you – depending on where you’re moving.
Next, look at your prospective new home, and get a feel for the size of the new rooms. Compare this to your existing home, and then decide what you need to do about the furniture. It may be that some rooms are similar in size, in which case you don’t need to do anything. However, in other cases it may mean that you have to get rid of a table or a couple of chairs to make everything fit in. It’s worthwhile doing this early on since you don’t want to take these things with you on your moving day. Instead, think about giving the furniture to friends or a charity, or try selling it if it’s relatively new.
Photo Credit: Neighbor City
Now, when you do get to your new home, the last thing you want to do is to spend weeks and weeks tripping over boxes and moving stuff around. As you pack, put color-coded labels on everything, with each label corresponding to one of the rooms in your new home. Then, when the movers arrive, tell them about your labeling scheme, but don’t expect them to follow it all by themselves. Instead, once they have loaded everything into the van, head down to your new home right away and stand by the door so you can see the labels and tell the movers where to put things.
Lastly, once everything has arrived at your new home, unpack as quickly as possible. Having lots of boxes lying around makes things look crowded and untidy. If you have just downsized, you may be feeling a bit cramped in your new place. Getting those boxes taken care of will make you feel better and make your new house feel like home.
Have i ever told you how I hate moving? We have moved a number of times for our careers. Even with help, it’s a pain in the butt. I get that about downsizing. We did that in the last move and even with good planning I still needed to get rid of stuff after.
Moving, the bane of my existence! When headed down South, I talked a lot to the driver of our moving truck while his minions were packing. He noted that my husband and I have relatively few possessions compared to most of the people he's moved. I will admit I am prone to taking stuff to Goodwill at least four times a year, if not more. I just feel better when stuff I never use isn't lying around. Plus, that tendency makes me pretty careful about what I purchase as well.
Ohh…my goodness that I cam across your informative blog. You have given your readers great tips on how to make their move stress free and downsizing their home easily. I do agree with you that storing some of the things in storage are better instead of carry them with you because it's only a burden for you and also create problem in moving. As there is an old saying that "less is more", so if you will have a less stuff then it becomes easy to move.
It will be at least 7 years until we downsize, but I can see that I need a plan. Thanks for the overview!
I agree that the downsizing is quite important whenever you feel that there is need to keep something spare to you for the future. These are really awesome ideas to help you the way you can bring downsizing.
Downsizing is really an important task, But one should be well aware about the timing when it is required. Really nice stuff to let us know about the same