I have moved more times than I can count. I really enjoy it but realize most people find it quite painful so I figured I’d share some of my moving tips.

Get Fit First

Yeah, I know nobody wants to read this but one of the main issues I hear about moving is that it physically hurts. This is because you over exert muscles that you have not over exerted in a long time. I strongly suggest all humans live life accompanied by a regular fitness regimen but if you’re going to move I would, at the very least, add some strength training to your daily schedule for the leading month up to the move. This will lessen the damage that traversing 200 flights of stairs or carrying 10,000lbs of material in a day will do to your body. There’s a reason why professional movers can move houses every day but us homeowners get wiped out after a single move.

Purge First

A month before you plan on moving while everything is still calm in the house, take a couple hours a week and rummage through your closets, storage, bedroom, kitchen and bathroom to identify what you really don’t use anymore. Separate yourself from it and either donate it or throw it away.

An easy win is to go through your kitchen ahead of time and throw away everything that is expired or otherwise useless to you. While doing so, be conscious of what is left in your kitchen to ensure you don’t have any waste food left when the move date does arrive.

Take your time

This is a big one. Far too many times have I tried to pack a house into boxes only to go pickup a truck and try to load it in a day. Moving becomes much easier when you take a few days to load and a few days to unpack. This can be tricky to do if you live in an apartment and have limited space to place a container or box truck but take the time to figure out how you’re going to take your time to do it. It helps if you start packing boxes in your house days or even weeks ahead of time and then break up the actual loading of your moving container over a few days so you don’t wipe yourself out trying to do it all in a single day.

Acquire Boxes

This is pretty obvious but it cannot be overstated how convenient it is to move well packed boxes vs moving hand fulls of random stuff. Even after you think you have everything packed, you should have some extra boxes because until the house is empty, not everything has been packed.

Hire Movers

This can be expensive but if the situation calls for it, it’s well worth the expense. When I moved in to a 3rd floor condo with no elevator and my wife was pregnant, I absolutely should have hired movers. Instead, Laila helped me move in while Z unpacked and it killed us all. If you know the situation is going to call for it, it’s better to leave the hard work to those who are prepared for it. Had I actually physically prepared for the move and taken my time doing it, we would have been less wiped out but this situation would still have been better served by hiring movers.