Moving is one of those things that I equally love and hate. On one hand there’s the joy of dreaming up all the new memories you’re going to make in your new place and imagining how you want each room to look, and on the other lies the all too familiar dread of inevitable stress, endless boxes of mystery items, and uprooting your life for weeks.

Kate here, and as most of you know my husband and I recently moved to a new place for the 5th time in 5 years. While I definitely don’t consider myself an extreme expert on the subject, I do think I’ve done this enough times to have some hopefully helpful advice to share.

This past move was definitely the most efficient one we’ve done yet, and we did the majority of it ourselves. Though we hired movers to bring our large pieces of furniture over to our new place, all of the box packing and transfer of everything smaller than a couch to the new house was done by us.

Of course, this was largely only doable because we were staying in the same city and could drive things to and from our new place. But whether you’re DIYing the entire moving process front to back or having someone help with some or all of it, doing these six things before, during and after your move can help the whole process feel so much more streamlined, simple, and most importantly, less stressful.

6 Tips To Make Moving Simple and Easy

At your old place…

1. Get rid of stuff before you start packing. No really.

This always seems like it’s the number one tip in any article related to moving, and there’s a good reason for it. I have done SO MANY MOVES where I told myself I would just throw out or give away whatever didn’t fit in the new place once I got there, and you know what? I never ended up getting rid of whatever it was. It just ended up overwhelming me too much to purge once we’d actually moved.

Purging well before you even start packing is the key to an intentional and streamlined move. With respect to your closet, I wrote a post not too long ago on the only 3 questions you need to ask yourself when cleaning out your closet, and those helped me a LOT during this move. They actually can work for just about anything in your house.

The major thing that helped me during this move when I started feeling guilty or emotional about whether or not to keep something was just picturing the life I was hoping to create in this new house - did this item feel like it had a central place in that new life? You usually know the answer to this one in your gut pretty quickly, and if it’s anything but ‘hell yes,’ it’s time to give away or sell it.

my new closet is so much happier that I purged BEFORE we got here

2. Consider everything you will need right away and pack those things separately.

One mistake I had made in the past was forgetting to set aside the practical things that I knew I would need during that first week in a new place and giving them a designated, separate box or bag.

For me this included anything I would normally pack for a long vacation, like toiletries, chargers, electronic devices, etc.- but also included a few things I wouldn’t normally need to pack for a trip. Hotels always have hairdryers, but your new house doesn’t yet. We also set aside things like the espresso machine, our dog’s bowls and food, and couple sets of utensils so we knew exactly where that stuff was on the first night in our new place.

3. Be extremely specific about what’s in every box

With this move, I started literally listing everything in every box and it helped so much. One benefit to doing the packing ourselves is always that we actually might remember what’s in each box since we were the ones that packed them, but after box #27 it all starts to run together.

Since I had to combine random things sometimes in order to minimize the amount of boxes we used, I started listing out the individual items inside with a sharpie. So rather than “kitchen tools” I would list ”KITCHEN: wood salad bowl, plastic spatulas and spoons, can opener, cheese graters.” It takes a tiny bit more time but it really pays off when you get to your new place and find yourself looking for that one random item.

a great example of what NOT to do….shoving boxes in a room to sit for months

Once you’re in your new place…

4. Start taking things out of boxes as quickly as you can

One of the great things about living In LA is that apartments and houses are relatively small (at least in our price range lol), and therefore don’t come with a lot of closets or extra rooms that can conveniently serve as ‘random shit’ collectors. This is hugely beneficial because it forces you to face the sea of boxes as soon as possible if you have nowhere to stash them.

During this move I found that I was much more motivated to put things away if I just ripped the bandaid off and took them out of their boxes as soon as possible. Something about looking at a bunch of loose random items hanging around was so much harder to put up with than seeing a neat stack of cardboard boxes in the corner, and it pushed me to figure out where these items should go much more quickly.

Another (very eco-friendly) alternative to this is to rent pallets that have to be returned by a specific date for your move. Our best friends just moved and did exactly this, and they both mentioned how much the deadline helped motivate them to unpack everything in a much more timely manner than they otherwise might have.

perks of having your temporary office on the couch - petting your dog all day

5. Create temporary spaces that help you function normally during the unpacking process

Inevitably during a move there are always going to be some rooms and spaces that are ready and livable before others. In our case, my studio and home office was still unfinished and without AC when we moved in, and I knew I needed to put climate control in that space before I could start working in there in order for my guitars to survive.

For the first 6 weeks of living in our new house, I stacked all of my guitars in our bedroom closet and set up a tiny makeshift desk in our living room with my planner, song notebook, laptop charger, and anything else I normally use every day.

I am the type of person who is VERY prone to thinking I have to have my office or work space ‘done’ before I can truly start working, and not only is this a super unproductive mindset but it’s also just a dumb excuse. Setting up a temporary workspace with everything I needed to get my work done forced me to acknowledge that I didn’t have to have every last design choice made and photo on the wall of my office before I could get some sh*t done.

Me & Nola on our long-awaited yellow velvet couch

6. Force yourself to decorate slowly

Since moving and adjusting to a new space takes time and a bit of trial and error to figure out the best configuration of everything from furniture to what stuff goes on which pantry shelves, this is probably the biggest piece of advice I can give.

I actually hate this advice, because as I just got done saying, I tend to need to make a space my own before I can feel settled there. But it’s SO worth it to take your time and allow yourself the space to make those choices with real intention.

I used to be so caught up in needing everything to be done that I would totally rule out ordering any decor or furniture that took longer than a couple weeks to arrive. The result was that I ended up with a lot of pieces that were fine, but not things I truly loved. You may have seen me talking about the couch I ordered for my studio over on instagram for the past few months, because it took about 2.5 months to ship. As annoying as it was to have nothing but a tiny sample to go off of for 10 weeks, it was SO worth it to wait for what I really wanted instead of settling.

Now that I’m starting to get the hang of decorating more slowly I’m actually really enjoying the process. I’m considering doing wallpaper in an area of my office, and taking the time to order several samples and try different things before committing was a huge game changer in the decision process.

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Have you moved recently? Any additional tips to share for a stress-free process?? Drop them in the comments!