Things I Forgot To Do When I Moved House (So You Don’t Have To)….

I like to think I’m quite an organised person. 😁

I make lists, I plan ahead and I’m generally on top of most things… I own a filofax so that makes me organised by default, right?

Moving house humbled me though and showed me that I am not the organised person because I managed to forget some really obvious things! 

Not big dramatic things, just the kind of small, annoying jobs that you don’t think about until they come back and bite you in the bum later on.

I completely forgot to tell most of my friends that we’d actually moved house and one friend who had obviously missed the obligatory “we’ve moved” Facebook post popped round to our old house with my birthday present the week after we’d moved out. No one was in, so she very kindly left it in the little porch as a surprise for me. 

Luckily the new people in our old house popped it round for me a couple of days later but not everyone would have done that. 😁

Then there was the more boring admin side of things, which I definitely didn’t handle as quickly as I should have. I forgot to transfer over our TV licence and for some reason they went from zero to one hundred instantly. The first letter we got at the new house wasn’t a gentle reminder, it was basically a threat of a house visit. That was a fun way to realise I’d forgotten something important.

It wasn’t just official things either. I remembered to update most of my addresses, but completely forgot about a few of the more random subscriptions. I have Instant Ink with HP, where they send you new cartridges when your printer is running low, and I didn’t update my address in time. So the people in our old house received my printer cartridge instead. Great for them, less helpful for me when I actually needed it to print out an important letter. 

Looking back, there were lots of little things like that. I thought I’d taken all the meter readings properly, but I hadn’t taken photos so I had nothing to double check against when I needed them. I also convinced myself I didn’t need to redirect my mail, which felt like a sensible money-saving decision at the time… until it wasn’t.

And then there were the practical moving day mistakes. I didn’t pack a proper “first night” box, so we were rummaging through boxes trying to find things like the kettle, tea bags and phone chargers. It sounds small, but when you’re tired and surrounded by boxes, those things matter more than you’d think.

I also had every intention of doing a proper deep clean before we moved everything in, but that didn’t happen either. Once the boxes are in, you end up cleaning around things rather than doing it properly, which is so much harder.

None of this was disastrous, it just made things more awkward than they needed to be. Moving house is one of those times where even if you’re organised, things still slip through the cracks.

The house gets sorted in the end, the boxes get unpacked eventually, and you do find everything you need… it just might not happen quite as smoothly as you imagined. 😄

I’d love you follow me on Twitter and it would be amazing to see you over on my Facebook page and on Instagram. If you’re interested, you can find out more about me here and while I’ve got your attention, if you’re wondering why some of my posts lately are a little bit less frugal then have a read of this post. 😉

Do your future self a favour – Pin this post for later.