Moving to a smaller place can be successful if you consider the floor space in your new home as a strict budget. Each item you decide to take with you fills a line in the budget, and you can’t go over it. People usually tackle downsizing with their feelings and get stuck. Instead, try to handle it with a focus on space, and the choices become obvious.
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Build Your Spatial Budget Before You Touch a Single Box
Obtain the floor plan of the new dwelling before you make a single other decision. Break out the tape measure and get the length of all the walls in each room, the width of all doorways and any particularly tricky elements like alcoves or structural columns. Then, check the measurements of the furniture you’re thinking about taking with you.
This step alone culls 20-30% of what people thought they’d bring. An oversized couch that’s barely managed in the living room of a family house will not physically squeeze through the door of a small apartment. A king-sized bed might technically slide in but render a second bedroom unusable walking space. This isn’t some fun optional extra, the floor plan blueprint is the tool that allows you to make those calls without endless and often inaccurate mental calculations.
Once you know what is physically able to exist in your new home, order the remaining items by function. Multi-use items get shuffled to the “keep” list. The second slow cooker or three spare sets of bed linen aren’t really items you’d choose to cull, but since you don’t have room for them, you don’t get a choice.
Pre-Empt the Physical Obstacles at the New Address
Logistical hiccups on moving day arise when you overlook access constraints. Tiny streets, low-hanging branches, a lack of an elevator booking at an apartment building, the need for a council parking permit, the stairwell is too narrow, these are all things you don’t want the truck driver to discover upon arrival.
This is particularly common in older, denser neighborhoods where street widths were set before anyone even thought about the size of a moving truck. Working with Vmove’s Inner West removalists means having a team that already knows all the lane restrictions, building regulations, and parking limitations that can be nasty ‘gotchas’ for any team that doesn’t understand the local area.
If you’re moving into an apartment, ring the building manager. If you’re moving into a house, think about ringing the local council to ask if they have parking permits for removalists and pull yourself a checklist together of everything you need to be aware of. Then, grab your tape measure, the clearance needs to be at least as high, wide, and long as your most enormous piece of furniture, and make sure the street’s got enough wiggle room.
Apply Two Rules to Everything You Own
When it comes to practical items, clothing, kitchen gadgets, tools, we use the one-year rule. If you haven’t used it in the past 12 months, it doesn’t make the cut to the new place. No exceptions, no “but I might need it someday” justifications. The new place can’t accommodate potential use.
With sentimental items, that math doesn’t compute. We know they’re important and we’re not telling you to give those things away if they really matter to you. We’re suggesting you administer that value with some cold-hearted logic. The most effective way to do that is a legacy plan: give important mementos to family members before you move, not after. It helps offset the loss as an act of purpose, and it gets the item in question off your mound without throwing it out.
There’s science to why this works beyond the logistics of reducing the number of boxes you’ll need to pack. A study by UCLA’s Center on Everyday Lives of Families discovered a direct link between household object density and elevated cortisol levels in homeowners, meaning a cluttered home literally makes you stressed out. Removing some stuff before you move in helps ensure the newfound space stays that way.
Reclaim Physical Storage Before Packing Begins
Paper is perhaps the biggest contributor to moving volume no one thinks about. Tax records, medical files, old correspondence, instruction manuals, most people have a decade or two’s worth of paper lying about that serves no daily function.
Digital archiving solves this problem without resorting to the flame. Important documents can be scanned and stored on the cloud, complete with careful folder organization. Photo albums can be digitized, as can any of those DVD or CD collections from back in the day. The originals can then be disposed of or packed into a single archive box. What would have taken a filing cabinet takes up a single folder on a hard drive.
This isn’t minimalism for minimalism’s sake. It’s about making sure that when the removalist goes to load that truck, every single thing on it has earned its right to take up physical space.
Pack For the Destination, Not the Origin
The typical approach to packing is room by room, but when you’re downsizing, that can be a recipe for disaster. Not all rooms in your new home will serve the same function as their similarly-named predecessors and may be different sizes. This can get overwhelming fast.
Rather than packing room by room, we suggest taking the ‘destination first’ approach. Develop a rough floor plan of the new place and identify different zones, kitchen, living area, main bedroom, etc. Assign each zone a color. Every time you pack something in a room in your current home, place a colored sticker on the box corresponding to the zone you want that item to end up at in your new place.
This way, boxes are marked based on their destination, not their origin. Once the truck is unloaded, each box goes straight to its zone. The room-by-room approach results in people second-guessing or not knowing what room to assign a box to in high-stress moving situations. This also allows you to easily track every item you’ve moved.
Get the Framework Right and the Move Follows
Successfully downsizing is a spatial optimization project. You measure first, then decide what to take based on the best fit. Next, you only pack what you are bringing with you to the destination. Finally, you resolve the logistics well in advance of moving day. Would you leave this last part of the process until two-thirds of the way through the timeline of an engineering project? Of course, the answer is no, but that is what happens all of the time in the physical moving world.
