Sometimes life calls for downsizing your home. Whether you are moving for work or pleasure a smaller home can often be more efficient and cost effective. While this may be appealing there can be a lot of challenges to living in a smaller home. You may find that while you enjoy having less square footage to tidy up, you’ll also have less storage. For those who have raised a family or are hitting their senior years it may be hard to know where to start with all the stuff you’ve accumulated over the years. We hope you find these tips helpful for the next time you are trying to declutter or downsize.
Downsizing your Home
Strategize and go one room at a time
When you’re trying to downsize your whole home the last thing you want to do is get overwhelmed. It’s best to plan out which rooms and spaces to do first and stick to doing one room and space at a time. Start with the least busy parts of the home before working your way up to the essential areas. It can be excellent practice to plan out a list of rooms and spaces so you can keep track as you go! Nothing says job done like a fully checked off to-do list.
Organize and Sort
With the goal of downsizing you really only want to bring your essentials and most treasured items. A general rule of thumb is to get rid of anything you haven’t used in a year. The more you get rid of now, the less you’ll have to move. When sorting your items it’s best to create 4 groups:
- Keep
- Donate
- Sell
- Trash
Selling and Donating
Now that your stuff is sorted it’s time for some potential earnings! Holding a garage sale can be a great way to earn extra funds for your upcoming relocation. It’s also easier than ever to sell your items online using apps and sites like Nextdoor, Facebook, E-bay, and others. Donating what ever lightly used goods you can’t or don’t want to sell is always a great way to dispose of things. One man’s trash is another man’s treasure after all and you never know what kind of difference your old stuff can make in some one else’s life.
Plan for Your New Space
Knowing the square footage and storage capabilities of your new space is essential to downsizing. This can help you decide what furniture will fit and potentially where it’s going. Having a rough idea of the furniture locations in your new home will also alleviate and extradite your move-in day. If your new home has storage, it’s important not to stuff it with things you’ll never use so you can utilize as much as you need for essentials.
Call Professionals with Downsizing Your Home
At the end of the day, you might be on a time crunch or just have too many high-value items to leave behind. You could put these items in expensive storage hoping to one day reunite, but you’re probably better off trying to sell them. In some cases you may need to call in an estate sale professional. Estate sellers typically come to your home and make an offer for your unneeded household items, from there they handle the rest of the sale process.
If it just comes down to needing more help and professional packing then you can rely on Caseys Movers local moving experts to get the job done. We are a Portland based mover but we do interstate moves all the time. Our experienced moving professionals can help you through every step of the downsizing process and make sure it’s done fast and done right.
We provide boxes at cost and come prepared with all the other supplies for protecting your items at no extra cost. In addition to our packing and moving services we offer move-in and move-out cleaning and are able to haul away any junk or debris. We are also happy to haul items off for donation to charities of your choice or of ours.
Thanks for tuning in and happy packing!