Preparing To Downsize Your Home: Helpful Tips to Make a Seamless Transition

Moving to a smaller property might cause an onslaught of different emotions. At first, you might be wondering why you’ve bothered climbing the property ladder in the first place, only to downsize. On the other hand, you might be excited about the limitations of a smaller house, as it requires less maintenance, frees up more of your monthly budget, and allows you to declutter.

Yet, downsizing is a significant transition, and as well as being financially prepared, you need to be prepared for the effect the move could have on your lifestyle. To help you with this, we’ve created this article detailing several helpful tips to simplify downsizing your home, including storage options, decluttering, and much more.

Find A Storage Solution

Moving house is an incredibly stressful process for all parties involved; therefore, it is essential that you have a backup plan on the day just in case everything doesn’t go according to plan. Whether you’re dealing with an incompetent removal company or the key release is delayed, there are dozens of things that could go wrong on moving day. The last thing you want is to be sat on the curb with hundreds of moving boxes surrounding you.

To protect you against the worst-case scenario, consider making alternative storage plans to give you somewhere to store your belongings if a moving day disaster occurs. One of the best ways to protect yourself is to hire a storage unit like the ones from Safestore, which can be rented out on a long or short-term basis until everything is resolved. Consider visiting their website to discover how their storage solutions could help turn your downsize into a seamless transition today.

Declutter Your Current Living Space

The whole point of downsizing is to reduce; therefore, there is no point filling your new, smaller house with the clutter from your current home. For starters, there wouldn’t be enough room, and even if there were, it would look messy. So, your first task is to declutter your living space by sorting items into three categories: keep, bin, and donate.

Get started by listing essentials and non-essentials you can refer to as you go through the house room-by-room. Once you’ve sorted everything into your three categories, you can get to work listing everything that can be sold on online marketplaces or mobile-based selling applications, and making trips to your local donation centre or charity shop until you’re left with the stuff you want to take.

Measure Your Furniture

We’ve all seen the iconic ‘The One with The Cop’ episode of Friends, in which Ross, Rachel, and Chandler are trying to ‘pivot’ Ross’ new couch up the stairs and into his apartment. Despite being a hilarious episode, unless you want your downsize to go the same way, we suggest measuring your existing furniture before moving it!

Downsizing to a smaller house generally means smaller rooms with varying dimensions. Due to this, furniture that may have fitted snugly in your larger home might look too big for your new space or not fit at all. Therefore, we suggest measuring the depth, height, and width of all your oversized items to save yourself from finding out this information the hard way.

Once you’ve measured all the items that give you doubt, it is best to get your new house’s measurements (if possible!) and compare them. Doing so will make moving your furnishings from one place to another much more straightforward and ensure you don’t run into any problems, making your downsize anything less than seamless.