Long Distance Moving: Tips for Homeowners Looking to Make the Process Smooth

Moving house is an inevitable milestone for many Brits (unless you’re incredibly fortunate!), with as many as 309,000 households moving to a new part of the country yearly. Whether you’re moving to a neighbouring city or several streets away, planning a move can cause an onslaught of emotions like excitement, sadness, anxiety, and stress.  

However, if you plan to relocate your household many – possibly even several hundred –miles across the country, the moving process can become a different ballgame. Moving long-distance presents various challenges you’ll have to overcome, from organising movers and decluttering your current house to creating an early moving plan and updating your address.

Yet, so long as you’re prepared, you can easily overcome the factors that long-distance moving presents. To help you, we’ve created this article full of our top long-distance moving tips to ensure that the process goes as smoothly as possible from when you decide to move until when your movers deliver your belongings to your new home. Keep reading to find out more…

Create A Plan As Soon As Possible

Whether you’ve lived at your current address for a couple of years or a decade, the longer you live in one place, the more belongings you accumulate. As you can imagine, the more stuff you must move – especially if it’s hundreds or even thousands of – miles away, the more complex the task becomes.

Due to this, even if you like to ‘go with the flow,’ it can be increasingly challenging to handle all the moving-related tasks on your to-do list without developing a plan to manage them. Not having a plan widens the scope for error, and the last thing you want is to have forgotten something – no matter how minor – and not realise until you are hundreds (or thousands!) of miles away.

Fortunately, there are several ways to prevent this, whether you use your laptop to create a moving Excel spreadsheet that allows you to track and tick off all your moving-related tasks as and when you complete them. Or, if you prefer a more hands-on approach, consider purchasing a journal to record all your pending and completed tasks, making the process much smoother.

Enlist The Services Of Reputable Movers

Since you could be moving hundreds or thousands of miles across the country, you want to ensure that all your belongings will survive the move by enlisting the services of reputable movers and packers. Providing that you connect with reliable movers and packers, they will be able to give you expert advice about the moving process and make it a smoother experience for everyone involved.

Even if you haven’t moved long distance before, we’re sure that you’ve heard nightmare-inducing stories about people’s belongings ending up in the wrong city, getting lost in transit, or even getting stolen by the movers themselves. To prevent your long-distance move from ending in a similar way to these stories, it’s essential that you don’t get caught up amid a moving scam by shopping around for trustworthy movers and packers.

Some of the things to look out for to determine whether a moving company is reputable or not are asking friends/family members for referrals, not settling for the first quote you’re given, looking at their credentials, checking with the Better Business Bureau, etc. If very few (or none!) of these apply to the movers you’ve found it’s best to walk away!

On the other hand, consider using sites like Compare My Move, which aims to connect UK home movers with a network of trusted professionals. On their site, you can find movers and packers, licensed conveyancers, RICS chartered surveyors and view quotes from companies you’ve connected with. Visit their site to find out how their services could help make your moving process smoother today, or contact them directly for specific enquiries.

Take The Time To Declutter

If you’ve lived at your current address for a long time, there is no doubt that you will have built-up an accumulation of belongings. So, if you’d like to avoid lugging all your worldly possessions between addresses, it’s worth trying to downsize as much as possible before setting your moving processes into motion.

Whether it’s clothes you haven’t worn since last year, electronic devices you’ve clung onto just in case they become useful later, children’s toys you haven’t the heart to throw out, books from your first-year university studies, etc. – every homeowner has clutter they’re reluctant to deal with, but trust us, you’ll be happy that you did once you move!

As you go through your items, ask yourself these three questions:

• Do you use the thing regularly?
• Are you particularly attached to the object?
• Do you need the item to survive?

Once you’ve determined your answers, we recommend sorting them into four categories; keep, toss, sell, or donate. In the end, you should be left with the items you want your movers to take to your new address, and the rest you can take down your local charity shop, give to friends/family members, donate to your local shelter, or sell on mobile applications like Depop or Vinted.

It will give salvageable items a chance at a new life and make you feel better knowing that you haven’t just tossed them in the bin. Not to mention, it will lower the quotation your movers have given you and significantly reduce the time it takes for you and your family to unpack your belongings so that you can get to doing what you deserve: relaxing.

Update Your Address

As your moving day creeps closer, ensure that any essential documents you need to take, subscriptions, etc., are updated with your new address. The last thing you want is for subscription boxes, letters, parcels etc., to be delivered to your old address when you’re finally settled in your new house (and we’re sure the new owners won’t be too impressed either!).

It might be annoying (and a little embarrassing) having to return to your old address for parcels, letters etc., when you’ve only moved down the street. However, this gets much more problematic when you’ve moved hundreds or thousands of miles across the country, and we’ll sure you’ll be kicking yourself if it happens. So, ensure that it doesn’t and update your address ASAP!

Make A List Of Things You Need On-Hand

When you move into your new property, you might find that your belongings are a couple of spaces behind, which is why it’s essential that you make a box of priority items that need to travel with you. For instance, you don’t want to arrive at your new home only to discover that all your bedding is packed neatly in the boxes en route to you in your mover’s van.

Instead, it’s best if you pack a few boxes or suitcases full of items you can keep while travelling up to your new home. This could be anything from towels, bedding, favourite clothing, toiletries, kitchen accessories, and anything else that springs to mind. Essentially what you choose to pack depends on your needs and what will make you comfortable until the moving van arrives with the remainder of your things.