Let’s talk about moving. (Insert crazy eyed, run for your life emoji.)
Moving is hard and even harder when you have kids. Relocating your family down the street or across the country is challenging.
Everyone seems to know that moving is hard. That’s why there are many, many blog posts with checklists and ways to make it easier on you and your family. So great right? Right! But you have to actually read them.
My family and I just relocated to a beautiful new home in Albuquerque. It was only our second move in 8 years of marriage and we plan on it being one of our last. Since I wasn’t looking to make a career out of moving, I quickly dismissed all those helpful posts on Pinterest thinking: “I’m only doing this once, how hard can it be?”
Stupid. I’m stupid. 
Guys, moving is so hard and I was totally unprepared for everything. But that doesn’t have to be you! I don’t have any amazing tips to fill up a blog post on things to make your move easier, (You can check out Resources page for that) but I can tell you what not to do.
1. Don’t neglect the garage.
The garage is the one room in the house that we completely neglected to pack up, because, well, it’s the garage. Things in the garage should already be packed up right? Wrong! Well at least in our situation. Had we taken the time before to just throw all those random odds and ends in a couple boxes, we could have saved ourselves a couple hours on Moving Day and a few trips afterwards too.
2. Don’t turn off the power in your old house
This might seem like a no brain-er to most of you but it wasn’t to me. Since this was only our second move and our first time selling a home, we didn’t really know how all the little things like switching over the utilities would work. I was so concerned with us having heat and power in our new house that I completely forgot about needing power in our old one. When we returned to clean and load up things that didn’t make it on the moving truck, it was cold and dark! You can talk with your realtor about what the typical protocol is for switching utilities.
3. Don’t expect it to be easy on your kids.
I was really surprised by how emotionally hard moving was on our kids. We were moving to a bigger, better house with stairs (stairs!) so I figured they would only be excited. But we were also moving from the only home my kids had ever known and bigger houses have more things to be scared of. So, prepare your kids and prepare yourself to deal with their emotions.
4. Don’t Miss Trash Day!
There’s a lot of trash involved in moving. Don’t ask me why, there just is. So one of the first things to figure out at your new house will be what day trash pick up is. Our new trash day is Monday, which we happened to miss on one of our first weeks at the new house. Have you ever missed trash day? It’s gross and stinky and you don’t want that to happen to you!
Do you have any moving tips?
