Getting your household ready to move is a major task and a
major stressor, and so is downsizing.
It is stressful, even if it's a joyful thing, you're going
to a different condo or moving to a wonderful new job. It's stressful.
Especially the older you get, the bigger the change, the longer you've been in
your space, the more stressful it can be.
The first thing you want to do, if you have the time, is to
mentally prepare yourself. Try to think about letting go of a lot of the past
and moving on to something fresh and new. Start thinking through what things do
I love? What do I need? What do I have to have? What can I part with?
It really helps to know where you're going. If you don't know where you're going it's hard to make decisions about what furniture is going to fit where. So once, you know, get the floor plan, measure things out, measure your furniture, think about how much distance it takes to back a chair out from the table so that you're not cramming yourself in so tightly that you just can't even move around in your new place.
Place the things you use most often between knee height and
where you can comfortably reach you’re your arm. Place things you use occasionally
or seasonally up high or down low. That way you aren’t climbing on a ladder or
crawling on the floor all the time.
As you're packing, always pack according to the room that
it's going into, not the room that it came out of. Then label that box with the
room it is going into. If you label the box with the room it is going into, when
the box is brought in, it can go to the room it will be unpacked into.
We have a whole color coded system. It works out great where we can actually put a little map on the wall, what the colors are for the movers to be able to just put things straight into the right room. Then you can look if you see a stack of boxes in the garage and it all has yellow tape and there's an orange one, you know it's in the wrong room. Then you can have them move it before the movers leave.