10 Things We’ve Done To Make The Move To Our New House As Stress-free As Possible
We moved to a newer part of the same community we’ve lived in for fifteen years. In fact, our new house is only about ten blocks from our current house (and shorter as the crow flies)!
Because of this, the kids won’t have to change schools (a major consideration in our decision.) Not only that but their walk to school is also almost exactly the same distance as it was from our current place. The school is basically halfway between our current house and our new house.
We decided to not make our offer conditional on our house selling. It might be stressful to float two mortgages for a bit but since we had a large part of the mortgage on our current house paid off already, it made it sense to not feel pressure to sell just to get moving on plans for our new place.
This has also allowed us to have a more leisurely timeline for everything – we have two weeks between possession and actually moving in which gives a lot of time for contractors, moving stuff and getting organized, furniture delivery, etc. etc.
Even though it adds to our costs up front, we chose to hire painters, cleaners, and various other contractors before we actually moved to our new house to make it as as close to a “new” house as possible when we move in. (There’s also a cost-saving to doing this work in an empty house versus people having to work around your furniture/toys/general mess in a few years or whatever.)
We also chose to hire movers instead of doing it ourselves (been there, done that!) but also to rent a BigSteelBox so we could still move a lot of smaller boxes/easier to carry stuff and leave the awkward/heavy stuff for the movers.
We were also very fortunate to be able to put down enough of a down payment to avoid CHMC mortgage insurance requirements.
Taking possession in late November isn’t ideal but it does mean that you’re buying right around Black Friday and we expect to get some good deals if we need to buy any electronics or whatever.
It’s sad for them but fortunate for us – a long-time local institution – Alford’s Floors and Interiors – is going out of business so we saved thousands buying some new living room furniture. The north Regina Lowe’s hardware store has also just started a liquidation sale so we’ve already bought a few things we needed at 20% off and expect those discounts to increase to 50% more as they get closer to the new year.
We’ve had a ton of support from both Shea’s folks and my folks – packing up our house, cleaning, doing repairs of our current house, unloading the “Big Steel Box” full of our belongings (even if it meant I had to take a lot of abuse about how many books I own) and more.
Bonus point: Speaking of furniture and stress-free, I really liked a brand of furniture that Shea found called “Stressless“. Unfortunately, their prices weren’t quite stressless, even if their design and comfort level were, so I took a pass on that particular purchase! Maybe in a few years when I’ve replenished the bank account? 😉
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