Learn how to prep for a stress-free and easy move in this series. The most wonderful and exciting news to share is that we are moving! Not too far away. I’ve mentioned this a few times, and I keep getting questions, “Oh my gosh, where are you moving to you?” It is a huge milestone. It’s something we have been waiting for, like five to seven years, for this move for a very long time, finally the right time. We’re so excited, but it’s just 15 minutes up the road. It’s in the same town I’ve been in for most of my life, but we are thrilled.

And what that means is the moving system that I created way back when I was in my twenties is going to get to come to life. This system will be a three-part series of how to prep for a stress free and easy move. Brought to you in the actual moments of when it’s happening for me, so you’re going to get the second or the third part of this series when it is happening over the next several weeks.

Listen below for the entire episode on The Systemize Your Life Podcast

We Are Moving

We are having a house built, which means we know our home’s completion date ahead of time. And that is a great thing because we have some prep time. Prep time is a key part of learning how to prep for a move. I am heavy in the prep phase right now. So we love my moving process because my system makes it so fun. I’m going to tell you a story about how I created this thing and also the unbelievably cheap and straightforward steps to make sure that the next time you move, it is a very stressful free smooth, relaxing, and enjoyable process. Putting not only that, you want to be able to get settled at home. How about we learn about part one and the prep phase of moving?

How I Created This System

Part of the reason I created this system was because I did not know how to prepare for a stress free move the first time I moved. I was probably early to mid-20s when I had first had to move. It was myself moving from a condo into a single-family house. I was like oh my gosh, I’m how going to get this done, are you kidding me? I need to find a way to afford movers. But now that I have this system and I have moved several times since then, everyone loves helping me move.

It is currently to the point where all of the people in my life are probably a little too old to be helping me now, so this might not work out this time around. I’m even to the point where I’m like, and I don’t want to sling boxes around here. So I am going to try hard to hire movers this time. The part that could be clearer about learning how to prep for moving is how to pack, when, and where.

Map Out Your New Home

Part of learning how to preparing for your next move is creating a map of your new space. You will need to draw a map of your new house and color-code each room. Then label the boxes assigned to your new home with a specific color.

This way, whenever people come over to help, you determine one to two people for each color. So, for example, you say, “hey, you get the color purple. Please find all the purple boxes, most of which should be in the living room. And you are responsible for getting them to the new house and into the color-coded purple room.

That allowed me to do all these cool things and direct the move. Then what I learned from that is that unpacking and getting resituated was an absolute and utter breeze. There was nothing to like the fuss over, and it was like, okay, everything for my bedroom is in my bedroom.

Now there was one move that I had that involved a storage facility. And I knew exactly where they were in a storage facility to put things in the back. Everything was labeled in a binder for me to know which ones needed to be at the front, because I was going to need more access to them.

Planning Your Time For the Move

When learning how to prep for a move the planning part may see overwhelming as a busy mom, but it doesn’t have to take several weeks. I’m giving myself 6 months so, this is part of that process right now at from day one on that first day of moving. So in practice, you can do this in a concise amount of time. You can do it in 4 weeks. We’re going to have about eight weeks or so to do this 8 to 10 what I had to look at and be very particular about is my business, the families schedule, our lifestyle, the girls, so that’s the first part.

I want you to sit down and want you to look at exactly when you want to start this process if I know we’re going to be in the wild. It could be four or six weeks, so you take the house you currently live in and divide it by that and be very specific. We’ve got about ten spaces that I won’t pack up. Generally speaking, I would need to have one entire room packed throughout the ten weeks, one for each weekend.

We can’t do that because we still need to function in these rooms while living in the house. The rule to be at least half way packed so that we have most of the rooms finished as we get closer to the end. As you get closer to your move date, you will have to start packing more. But, at least it won’t be so hard.

So looking at that, I’ve also strategically planned that every week these two days after kids get out of school, I will have to pack a little bit for myself. And then Saturday, that is all you need to do regarding pre-planning for them.

Creating Your Binder for the Move

This binder is key to learning how to prep for a stress-free and easy move.

Here are the things that you need to create your binder.

• three-ring binder
• some dividers
• some lined paper
• a pencil
• a three-ring hole punch
• a permanent marker
• labels stickers that you can find here.

Go ahead and take the sketched a map of your new home on a sheet of paper inside your binder and label it by each room. Next, add a separate sheet of paper for each floor if you have multiple stories.

Be sure to include the rooms and how the layout is, and on that map, you are going to color code them according to the label sticker colors. Put that inside of your binder.

You will have ten dividers for every single room. And on the divider, you have the name of that room. You can color code them, too if you like. You can also make the tabs the same sticker color and mark the person who will be responsible for that room.

The binder is cool because you can keep any information you may need to know. Any of your administrative stuff that goes with moving, and keep that in the binder to make it more accessible. If you have questions or need help head over to the free Facebook Community and reach out!

Get Ready to Pack Up

Packing should be the easy part of how to prep for the a move. This is how you get super organized and make packing fun. So when you go to pack, you will pack according to your new home map your just created.

So if you are packing for, let us say, your nursery and that kiddo is currently in the same room with you. You would want to avoid going into your room and packing everything together. Instead, you want to ensure those things are going into two rooms and color-coding them separately for two rooms.

Making Everything Easily Located

Another example, for how I prep for the move, is that my two girls have two huge rooms and jack and jill bathrooms. So in the new home, we will have lots of boxes labeled loft, since that will be their new room.

So I go to the have a tab in the binder that says loft, and I will write down Barbie’s for that box number one since it’s the first box I packed. Then I went to box number two, and I wrote down in that same tab everything that was in that box. One of the seven boxes for this room had nerf guns, karaoke, and RC Cars.

And I will have got to the new house and have yet to unpack, and someone will ask for those nerf guns. So I will go to the binder and know which box the nerf guns are in. I’m not even joking I have done this so many times, and it is blissful. That is why it is so important to learn how to prep for a move and I am excited to share this.

“So we love my moving process because my system makes it so fun. I’m going to tell you a story about how I created this thing, and also the unbelievably cheap and straightforward steps to make sure that the next time you move, it is a very stressful free smooth, relaxing, and enjoyable process”