What Moving Processes Can (Or Should) You Enact Yourself?

Many people think of moving as a complex recipe filled with many different outsourced actors. This is true in many ways.

Your real estate agent will often spend time marketing the property to prospective buyers, your lawyer will look over the contract, a house inspector will make sure the property you’re purchasing is in good shape and worth the asking price, and of course, local movers will safely transport your possessions from A to B.

Regardless, it’s important to ask a considered question – what moving processes can, or should, you enact yourself if you hoped to be a little more DIY? What plans should you leave to the experts? And how, in the long run, can you be sure that a reasonable interest in cost-cutting won’t leave you without the vital services you need?

All of these are reasonable questions, and so for that we hope to answer them using the following advice:

Furniture Disassembly and Assembly

While removalist services will often be more than happy to pack certain items for you, they might not always want to deconstruct furniture because doing so could potentially damage it. That’s why it’s good to break down chairs where that can be done (like deconstructing office chairs for removal), to protect your couch cushions and placing them in the right bags, and even taking apart bed frames to carry it more portably and help it leave the house in the first place. In the long run, you will also be better able to organize and label these items if you do it yourself.

Deep Cleaning

You can absolutely hire a third-party service to clean your home before you go, of course, but there’s nothing quite like making certain everything is perfect yourself, documenting as you go so you can prove the effort you went to. Here you can also put up notes for the newcomers about how to operate certain parts of the house, you can make sure all windows and doors are locked, all utilities have been switched off, and any small DIY tasks that should be done can be done or left to the homeowner – but at least you’ll make that distinction yourself.

Personal Documents & Valuables Handling

Of course, it’s more than understandable to keep your most essential documentation and valuables to yourself. Purchasing protective folders and bags to bring them, or even keeping valuables in safe storage for you to come and collect later can be ideal. This way, you don’t have to worry about them during the continual inventory Tetris of packing your belongings, risking damaging an item without meaning to. Personal documents can also be very useful to have in place and always accounted for when moving abroad, because you’ll need to provide this at every gateway. You can even use a trackable GPS or air tag to make sure this folder is never outside of your possession for long.

With this advice, you’re sure to enact those moving processes that make more sense to curate yourself.