Moving House Made Easy: Pack a Holiday Suitcase

When you are moving to a new house, the hardest days are the last few days at the old place and the first few days at the new place. Most of your things are packed, but you still need to manage until you finish unpacking the necessities.

Pack a suitcase for a week

For the move, pack suitcases as if you were going for a one week holiday. I have found this tip to be very useful. The first week in a new house can be very challenging, because otherwise, you start opening boxes to find things and leave them half unpacked. The mess will drive you nuts.

If you treat the new house like a hotel room for a while, you won’t start panicking when you need something, because you’ve already put it aside. Like in any hotel room, the essentials will be there: the beds, the refrigerator, the tables, the chairs. All you need to do is pack the same things you would need if you went to a serviced apartment:

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Moving House Made Easy: Movers

Moving house can be a stressful situation. To make your life easier, find trustworthy and reliable movers. Adding unreliable movers to your list of things to deal with will make the move more expensive, not to mention draining emotionally, and you need all the energy you can get to manage such a big transition.

Some professional movers will take advantage of your situation and put pressure on you. To prepare, get 3 quotes for everything. Make sure there is an agreement they cannot get out of.

Some movers (called “removalists” in Australia) will come to your door on the day of the move and say that you have to add more money because you have more furniture than they thought when they gave you a quote. Or a cleaner might say, “Oh, I didn’t realize the carpet was so dirty” and since you are rushed to get it done on the day, you have no choice but to pay the extra before they are willing to start working.

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Social Media Reality: Look Up! What Are You Missing?

Technology and social media have become a significant part of our life. Recently, I learned some valuable lessons about just how they affect us and the opportunities they make us miss.

My 13-year-old daughter, Noff, is the youngest in our family. Lately, she has been struggling with not having a mobile phone to take to school. To her, mobile phones are very cool. Some kids need them to coordinate pick-up times or for safety on the bus.

Unfortunately for her, she does not need it for any of those things. She so much wants to be part of the mobile phone in-crowd that she uses our old phones to play games. She struggles with not being like everyone else and I struggle with my parenting.

I have some beliefs and rules about social media and I know I need to adjust them to suit the times. I have three kids and I cannot apply the same parenting rules regarding media with Noff that I did with my first two.

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Moving House Made Easy: The New Place

Moving to a new place is very exciting and a great opportunity to start fresh. A helpful tip to make the move smoother for everyone is to prepare them for what it is going to be like ahead of time.

How to prepare

When we move, we are usually concerned with the change in our basic needs and services. Being used to the old place, it can be hard to imagine what life in the new place is going to be like.

If you can, check out the new place. Checking out the new place ahead of time makes it easier to prepare yourself and your family for the new environment. If you get a chance to do that, take note of the surrounding area as well. This will make it easier for the entire family to prepare emotionally.

Visit those places physically with your kids, if possible, to make sure they have something to look forward to.

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Moving House Made Easy: Telling the Kids

Snail with house on back saying: we are moving

One major challenge of moving houses is telling the kids about it. Most parents are afraid to do this. They wonder when the right time will be to share the information with the kids and how to do it.

If you have young kids, do not tell them about the move a long time in advance.

Children’s perception of time is not sophisticated enough yet and they will just be anxious. As soon as you tell your kids that the move is on, they begin to deal emotionally by saying goodbye to the people and things around them (this is a coping mechanism we all have to manage). As a result, kids who are about to move away are often not invited to parties. People around them do not invest in their relationships any more.

This happens to adults as well…

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Moving House Made Easy: Packing

Now that your are done with cleaning, today’s tip is about packing. Packing your house is one of the things that make moving so hard. After moving house more than 25 times, I have collected a few tips to make packing a little bit easier.

Make a packing schedule. If you think it won’t take too long, you are probably wrong. Yes, it is possible to pack an entire house in 3 days, but you will regret it when you get to the unpacking end. Leave one week at the end for the small things. They take the most time.
Start your packing from the garage, basement, or attic – the places that you don’t use as often. That way, when you move into your new house, you won’t have to open these boxes. They can stay closed until you need them.

Note: make sure to leave a tool box, ropes, tape, fixing and packaging material handy.

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Moving House Made Easy: Spring Cleaning

Moving house has been a big part of my life. I have already moved 25 times, sometimes to another country on the other side of the world.

My first move was when I was 15. I do not remember anything since my mom and dad were in charge of moving. In the following 2 years, we moved again twice, to a rented apartment and then to a house, in which I lived for another 5 years.

From the 4th house to the 25th, in which I live today, I moved as a grownup. Some of the moves were as a student and in others I was already a parent. During one move, I was pregnant. Some house moving was to a different countries and even continent. I guess you can say I am a very experienced mover.

Many people ask me “What’s your moving secret? How did move so many times, and so successfully?” The answer is this:

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Kids: The Best Anti-Smoking Incentive

Smoking is bad. Everyone knows that. Unfortunately not everyone understands it. Countless campaigns have tried and failed to encourage people to quit smoking but I think kids have the power to make a difference.

When I was growing up, my dad was a smoker. He was not one of those people who smoked a cigarette every once in a while. He smoked more than a packet a day. For my dad, smoking was a manly thing. While my mom never smoked, and my older sister fought with him about for years, he kept on smoking. Even at home, next to us. He had no intention of stopping. His excuse was, “I have been smoking for years. I can’t stop now”.

One day, he found out that my brother, who was about 16 years old, had smoked his cigarettes. He freaked out. I remember that day. He was furious. He ran around screaming like a crazy man. My sister, who was 17 years old at the time, said something to him that changed his perspective completely. She said, “How can you tell him smoking is bad for him if you smoke yourself?”.

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10 Tips for Re-Building Trust

Trust is a very important ingredient in relationships and when it is broken, it is hard to mend. In all the years I have been coaching couples, the most challenging were those whose trust has been broken.

My mom used to tell me, “It takes a long time to milk a cow but seconds to spill the milk in the bucket”. Trust is just the same. It takes a long time to build and seconds to destroy. My first suggestion for all you couple is to guard their trust at all costs because it is one of the hardest things to fix.

Trust is built on honesty and telling the truth. In every marriage, there is an agreement to be truthful. As soon as one person lies, even once, it is like forming a tiny crack in the milk buckets which slowly lets out all the milk.

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Husband and Wife Working Together (poll)

Paper game with the words Work, Life and Balance

I have been in business ever since I graduated university. I was 24 at the time. Luckily, my husband Gal worked a job and supported my business adventures. When I asked him about having his own business back then, he said he liked the way things were. Over 24 years ago, he did not think having his own business was an option. Not to mention working from home and/or working with me.

About 10 years ago, we started working together, from home. We soon discovered that we are very different people who enjoy doing very different things. Each of us slowly drifted towards the things that meant more to us. I veered towards life coaching and education and he went towards systems and consulting in one way or another.

The last 10 years have been challenging and rewarding in many ways. This has gotten us asking questions about working together and working together from home. Many of my clients ask me about this.

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