I’m writing this from a phone. We moved to our new home this week and I have no idea where the charger to our laptop is hiding!

A few weeks ago I shared our family’s plans to downsize. With the housing market in recovery, I did not expect that our house would sell anytime soon. But much to our surprise, we had an offer within three weeks, and after some hectic negotiations, we accepted! It took about six weeks, from listing to closing, to sell our house. We had about three weekends to pack up. It was a pretty eventful time for us! Here some of the things that worked out for us, plus the things that we found difficult:

Purging: I took moving as an opportunity to get rid of a lot of the clutter around our house. I figured each thing I got rid of would be one fewer item to pack. Also, our new place is quite a bit smaller than our old home, and we don’t have a lot of storage space, so it was necessary to pare down. Over the course of about three weeks we got rid of probably a third of our belongings. The first two weeks we cleared out all of our valuable, but unused items. The weekend before we moved we had a garage sale. We priced things aggressively to ensure they sold. We also donated a lot of odds and ends. Now that we are in the new house I am planning to get rid of even more stuff as I unpack and can better determine what we need and where we have a surplus.

Use it all up: Once we put our house on the market, I made it my goal to use what we had instead of buying anything new. We managed to eat almost everything in our fridge, deep freezer, and pantry, which made it a lot easier to manage moving those appliances and their contents. Same goes for beauty products, medicine, gift wrap, craft items, and office supplies.

For the last few days, buy shelf-stable foodstuffs: We ate a lot of peanut butter sandwiches in the days leading up to our move. We also did a lot of takeout and fast food, but any time we could make a meal out of food we had on hand was healthier and better for our budget.

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Get your child(ren) excited about the new place (if possible). We didn’t move far, so Scribble had the chance to get comfortable in the new house. We took all of his toys from the old house to the new one about a week before we moved, and he played with them in his new room while we unpacked.

Embrace screentime. Daniel Tiger haunts my dreams. It wasn’t pretty, but it was necessary. I try to be mindful of screentime, but I felt that this move was best for everyone in the long term, so I got over my anxieties and went with it.

Take small loads (if possible): I hate packing boxes for a local move. For two weeks we took one or two carloads a day to the new house. We hired movers to handle the furniture, but the house was largely picked clean by that time.

Stay flexible and expect positive. Having a set closing date forced us to get packing. We really had no choice but to maintain a positive attitude, otherwise we wouldn’t have gotten everything done in time. We pretty much threw all bedtimes, sleeping arrangements, and meal plans out the window for a few days. My kid survived on Subway and french fries for nearly a week. The first night we spent in the house, Scribble collapsed in our bed and immediately fell asleep. We ended up transferring him to his pack and play and letting him sleep at the foot of our bed, which was the first time he had slept in our room in over a year.

Get started early: This was an area of needed improvement for us. Since we were selling our house, our schedule was determined by the buyers. We didn’t start packing until we had a contract. In hindsight it would have been smarter to pack up a lot of the extraneous stuff before we even put the house on the market. If you are planning to stage your house for selling, it could be a good idea to pack up a lot of the decorative and personal items around your home to make the rooms look bigger and less cluttered, and reduce the amount of work you have to do once the house is sold. If you lack the storage space to keep packed boxes, you might consider renting a storage unit while your house is on the market, and slowly packing non-essential and out-of-season things while you wait for your house to sell or for your lease to expire.

Ask for help: This was another area in which we could have improved. We packed up a four bedroom house pretty much solo. Our regular babysitters (grandparents) were feeling under the weather so we couldn’t lean on them as usual. In hindsight it might have been useful to hire a babysitter or mother’s helper to tend to Scribble while we worked.

Expect the unexpected: Ok, that’s not always possible but it is possible to build time into your schedule so that you are not crippled by setbacks. The week we were scheduled to move, Scribble and I both came down with a hellacious stomach virus (details redacted). I was sick in a nearly empty house with our creature comforts packed away, with a to-do list a million miles long, and a team of movers scheduled to arrive in the morning. It was gross and frustrating! Looking back we should have outlined and scheduled all the steps needed to move so that we could recover from the delay more quickly, and kept more food and snacks on hand to make it easier to make meals on the fly.

Moving was definitely no fun, but I was pleased at how we all rose to the occasion and remained flexible throughout the process. It definitely made me feel more confident that we can take on big challenges as a family team!