Moving Week- Day 5 Leaving behind your house

If you missed any of the posts this week you can catch up here. We've talked about supplies needed for moving, Pinterest ideas I tried out while moving, general tips and tricks, and home showing preparation.

Today I have a list of a couple suggestions for when the day comes to move out of your home.

• For our buyer we left a packet of instructions for our home. Inside of the packet we included the instruction booklets for the appliances that were staying, a parks and recreation fall schedule we had recently gotten in the mail, the trash schedule mailer which included what could be recycled and curb side yard waste pick up, and a list of quirks about the house. The list of quirks included how the dishwasher sometimes needs an extra click to start but it works great, what light switches go to what, and when we replaced the roof and other important dates. 
• We were close friends with our neighbors. We had helped each other out with projects. We had learned valuable skills about maintaining our home from them and we had developed a friendship. Leaving was hard for us so we got them little treats to show them we would miss them. I went to the dollar store and loaded up on candy. I wrote little poems to go along with each stack of candy. Here are the three different poems I used. 

Dear _____ Family,

You are such Sweethears (tarts)

Who were our Lifesavers

and help us our a Good and Plenty

Big (Red) Thanks, The ____ Family

The ______ Family,

Sometimes we were Goobers

and we got ourselves into a Buncha Crunches

You were our  Lifesavers

that helped us out a Good and Plenty!

-Big (Red) Thanks, The ______ Family

Dear ______ Family,

You all are such Sweethears (tarts)

that we are going to miss Bunches (Crunches)

-Big (Red) Thanks!  The _______ Family

I hope you enjoyed the week of moving posts! If you're moving good luck! I would love to hear from you all about tips that you have! Have a great weekend!

Moving Week- Day 4 Leaving for a showing

If you miss any of the posts this week you can catch up here. We've talked about supplies needed for moving, Pinterest ideas I tried out while moving, and general tips and tricks.

Today we're talking about what to do when you are leaving the house for a showing. 

When we moved our Realtor was amazing! She got us an experienced home stager and a great photographer for the pictures of the house for online. I would HIGHLY suggest getting a stager. You can tell a huge different in a home that is staged. We spent 2 months getting our home ready to sell. Well, technically we spent about 6 months because we started big home renovations the October before we put our house on the market for that reason. We put down sod, fresh flowers, and mulch in the yard as well as painted the house. We scrubbed every corner until it sparkled. We had about 30 showings before we finally got our second offer and it officially sold. All in all it was on the market three months before we were under contract for good. (We got one offer very quickly but it fell through)  With a baby it was hard to keep it in showing condition. Here are a few tips that we did*

This is PB outside hanging out while we worked on the exterior of the house. She just stayed in the shade on a blanket all day. 

• Make your home a shell. Take down your personal effects and things specific to you. You want the buyers to see themselves in your house. This means knick knacks, pictures, and extra furniture into storage.
• Make sure your lawn is not over grown and your driveway and front porch are power washed and cleaned. I viewed two homes that were the same home plan in two different neighborhoods. The outdoor appearance (and cleanliness inside) totally made me hate the unkempt house and only later did I realize that they were the same floor plan. 
• Make sure your carpets are clean and vacuumed. Yucky carpets are a huge turnoff.
• Do laundry often so that it does not get piled up in the hamper. Even when dirty clothes are in a hamper if there are a lot of them it stinks! 
• Before you go to bed each night make sure that your house is in showing condition so you will have less to do if there is a showing the next day.
• Leave out only a few toys that can be hidden in a discreet place. We kept PB's in our TV stand and behind the couch where they could be easily shoved away. 
• Great places to take kids while you're waiting for a showing to be done are a fast food restaurant with a play place, a playground, Target, or a museum. 
• Make sure your house smells like coming home. In the mornings we would make our buyers cinnamon rolls and during the day it was cookies. I have also heard of put vanilla in a warm stove.
• We made an inviting table to draw their eye when they came in. On the kitchen table I put out a fresh table cloth with flowers (sometimes fresh- usually fake), the home brochures, the warm cookies, a decorative container with ice and mini bottles of water, with a sign that said "Please Help Yourself" in fancy writing in a cute frame. 

I wish I had a picture of the last suggestion but we were usually rushing out of the house and did not have time to do anything but get our seats buckled and leave!

I hope some of these tips helped. Do you have any home prep tips for showings?!

Tomorrow, on our last day were are talking about leaving our homes and neighborhoods. 

*Note: I'm not sharing staging tips I was given by our Realtor and home stager. I consider those the intellectual property of our home stager and Realtor. These are tips that I found on my own, were suggested from family and friends, or I noticed while viewing homes as a buyer. 

Moving Day 3- Tips and Tricks

Hooray for day three!  If you want to see other posts in this series Monday was supplies to use and Tuesday was Pinterest ideas I tried out.

Today is general tips for moving!

• Packing:
• I didn't know where I wanted a lot of my decor for the new house so I labeled it all to go to the same spot. Once it got there I could decide where it should go from there. 
  
  
  
  
  
• Most of our paperwork got packed up but I kept out the important thing. The things I would need right before, during, and after closing. I had my old and new loan documents, our passports/birth certificates/ss cards, extra pens and paper, and child proofing items in there. The child proofing things were collected as we emptied out drawers and were kept there so that we could put them on the outlets and cabinets as soon as we got to the new house. This bag was in addition to the bag I talked about on Monday with moving supplies in it. 
• Don't pack boxes too heavy. It's really easy to just take all of your books and put them in the same box. Be careful how many books you put in the box. It could make the box break or you could hurt the back of the person carrying it!
• Don't take your clothes off the hanger! That takes forever to do and forever to put back on the hangers. You can get clothes hanging boxes or the much easier and less expensive option is to get trash bags and tear a hole in the center of the bottom and put them over your clothes with the crook of the hanger out of the hole. Stuff the parts that don't fit into the bottom and pull the draw string closed. Tape the hangers together. 
• Pack your sheets on top so you can make your bed first when you get there. 
• I had a schedule for when I would pack everything up. The last minute items such as food, dishes, clothing, toiletries all need to be packed and can't be done at the same time since that is a whole lot of stuff. I had a plan for each day. When I packed my toiletries I had travel ones to get us through moving. When I packed our dishes I had purchased a huge thing of styrafoam plates. I scheduled out our meals and only kept out the food we needed. I made a schedule of all of this so I could make sure it all got done in time.
  
• Have an on going box to go to charity. I had multiple bags and they all went at once. 
• Labeling boxes
• Label EVERYTHING. Use masking tape to label furniture, big bins, and other large items. My goal was to have the only question people ask me on moving day was "What can I do next?"
• On Monday I talked about the labels I used. So when I was at our old house I drew a rough layout map of our new house and numbered each room. I taped this map next to the door the stuff would be coming through on moving in day. Each box had a number on yellow tape, blue tape if it was heavy, red tape if it was fragile, and an orange X if it needed to be last one on first one off. The label was placed so it could be seen from the top or side. 
• Moving your stuff
• Who doesn't love free labor? We asked for help at church and got the teenage boys as well as quite a few other men and women to help us. That morning I didn't know how we would get everything done but two amazing people from our church showed up. We couldn't have done it without them!
• We told all of the people that were coming to help that we were going to have food at certain times. We had $5 pizza on moving out day and subs on moving in day. Both were super easy to set out and clean up.
• At our final walk through I brought a tape measure. I measured where our furniture would fit so I was sure where I wanted it while I still had muscle there to move it. No couches in the middle of the living room for me!
• I'm a firm believer that unless a child can help out a lot (ie a teenager) they should be somewhere else during moving. My sister-in-law and her family graciously watched PB for two days while we moved. It was the longest I had ever been away from her and it was really hard but it helped out so much no to have to worry about nap times and where she could safely play.
  
• Saving Money
• For our moving truck I used a promo code I found on a discount site. I compared three different companies and we got a great price.
• When you change your address you will get great coupons in the packet! My favorites are the ones to home improvements stores. Also look on their websites for moving incentives and coupons.
• Once you get there
• Set up your beds first! That way you can fall into them when you get too exhausted to move anything else
• For safety you should rekey your house. We were worried about the price of new locks and door knobs and we're DIYers so we found a tutorial online and changed the pins inside of our existing locks with a kit we bought on Amazon. Instead of spending hundreds of dollars we spent $7. That's a good exchange!

Phew! I think that's about all I have until tomorrow! Do you have any tips for moving?

Enjoy this post?! Here are four others in the series:

Day 2- Pinterest Ideas I tried out

Day 3- General Tips and Tricks

Day 4- Preparing Your House for Showings

Day 5- Leaving Behind Your Home and Neighbors

Moving Week: Day 2 Pinterest Ideas

Welcome to Moving day two! To see day one which talked about supplies for moving go here.

Today we're talking about some of the tips I used from Pinterest and the ones I wished I had.

I had seen a couple tricks for packing up dishes on Pinterest and I decided to combine them.

Here is the first pin that I tried. I have two sets of dishes to I used two buckets. This only partially worked. One of my buckets was a 5-gallon bucket and the other was a 3-gallon bucket. The problem was that both buckets tapered and I'm not sure if all buckets taper but both of the ones I had did. . I put a sturdy plastic bag (like one you get from a clothing store not the grocery store) inside and then placed the bags in but they still wedged in 6 inches above the bottom of the bucket. Knowing that though you could put something in the bottom. This makes the bucket very heavy so much make sure you mark that the bucket is heavy.

I also used this trick to pack my dishes inside the buckets.

This worked well and we didn't have any casualties.

Here is one tip I wished I had used:




and here is one great blog post about moving.

Have you found any great pins about moving?

Join us tomorrow for general packing and moving tips! 

Moving Week: Day 1

WGC isn't going anywhere! These are just tips and tricks for moving!

I'm taking over the blog this week to tell you all something about I've been meaning to blog about for 6 months.

When we moved back in September we had been in our home for five years, we were very close to our neighbors, we had outgrown our house and were looking to move in town. Oh and did I mention I had never moved before? My parents moved when I was a baby to the house I grew up in and I moved myself out to college and then in to our little first house when we got married but I had never moved houses (at least that I could remember ;) ) 

I was very nervous. I researched moving on Pinterest and got tricks from our family and friends. Luckily my husband's family moved around many times growing up so he had some tricks of his own. 

To start our week off we're going to talk about supplies and labeling.

1. Boxes: 

• Try your hardest to get boxes that are the same size. Moving boxes come in pretty standard sizes. We were lucky that my husband's brother worked at a local fast food restaurant and we got the majority of our boxes from there. Same size boxes are much easier to pack in a truck. 
• Other places to get boxes are on Craigslist- you have to be quick to get the ones that are free, or purchasing them at places like U-haul or a home improvement store. U-haul boxes are nice because you can buy a bunch and if you buy too many you can return the extras. 
• Make sure your boxes are sturdy and have not spent too much time in hot or cold weather or been exposed to water. 
• Tape the bottom of boxes that will be heavy multiple times to make sure they can withstand the weight.

2. Tape:

Amazon listing

• Name brand tape will always to be easier to use but I also used quite a bit of the Target brand's tape and we were happy with it. We went through about 6 rolls of tape for our 1100 sq. ft home with three people.
• Use a hand held dispenser. They save a ton of time. The one pictured above is the one we have.

3. Permanent Markers: I found the best ones were the retractable ones to I never misplaced a cap. I used 3 markers until they were dry

Amazon listing

4. Labels: I used a system that I thought was very organized but my husband thought was a little over-the-top. I used white labels like this

Amazon listing

and added colored tape

to label each box. I drew a map of each room of the house (more about this on Wednesday) and numbered each box on the yellow. Blue meant the box was heavy, red meant the box was fragile, and an orange X meant it needed to be last in and first out. Packing took a little extra time but unpacking the truck took very little time. Here is a picture of PB helping me label boxes. You can see what the labels looked like here.

5.Moving supplies bag: I used a gallon sized bag to keep my extra tape, markers, labels, scissors, to-do lists, and anything else needed for moving in one central location. 

What supplies did you have find useful while moving?

Come back tomorrow for Pinterest suggestions I tried out!

Day 2- Pinterest Ideas I tried out

Day 3- General Tips and Tricks

Day 4- Preparing Your House for Showings

Day 5- Leaving Behind Your Home and Neighbors