Tips to plan movement into a new apartment

Sometimes it’s happening, and you decide to move into a new place. Maybe another city or a country, another district closer to your workplace (that sounds funny during the covid outbreak, I know). At first look, it might be confusing and very stressful to even think about moving into another living place. Still, after you made it, you can realize — that was a very positive experience. This article helps you switch from random hustling into the structured plan and get nice vibes during the movement and after.

This article is based on my experience of moving from one place to another within the same city in a predicted amount of time, with minimum involvement of personal time.

Timelines and commitments

First of all, define the proper timelines. You need to have an exact date when all the stuff from an old place should be completely moved into a new one, no exceptions. Otherwise, the risk of delays and procrastination will dramatically rise.

Set meaningful expectations from your calendar and you will get great results: “By next Sunday evening all belongings from my old home will be transferred into new place” sounds more realistic than “I’ll take a few boxes with me on a weekend or maybe next one, I’m pretty busy these days…”.

Once you're able to set the redlines start to plan the next things:

• Timeboxes for preparation and gathering the belongings together: “Every evening after work I will spend two hours on packing my stuff” is much better than “I have a few minutes after breakfast before I’ll go to work so I can make some preparations”.
• Estimate the number and volume of belongings that have to be moved. This is probably the hardest part, so it can be split into smaller chapters (like kitchen, bedroom, books) and estimating them individually.
• The proper place to store the stuff already packed.
• Buy enough of the boxes (medium and big size, more = better), a bold marker to write the box contents, and enough scotch tape to safely pack assets. Bubble wraps can also be helpful if you are having some fragile items.
• Don’t forget to book time at your local transportation dealer, this would be the final time commitment for the plan! Ideally — avoid moving on your own, as this is inconvenient and definitely will cost you a lot of time and resources. Of course, an exception here would be if you have a lot of friends who love to lift heavy stuff and have trailers :)

While making any of the preparation, one minor thing to mention, that moving is a great chance to get rid of old and unneeded stuff you have and no longer in use. Would be great to have a set of packages dedicated to collect everything you always wanted to throw out but never did. This would be the perfect match to leave unneeded stuff in the past.

Execute!

While building plans can be stressful, the execution will go smooth once you are well prepared.

From my own experience, I’d recommend starting from the small things, the kitchen would be the nightmare so it’s a great starting point. If you could deal with a million small fragile the rest of the moving would be relaxation and calmness :)