How to Downsize your Home when Planning to Move

This is a sponsored post written by me on behalf of CORT for IZEA. All opinions are 100% mine.

Moving is hard, I get that.  This word can cause someone to experience feelings of dread and anxiety. I’m certainly one of those people and am staring down our upcoming move with my fair share of worry. Several years ago, we upgraded our home and moved into a very large, luxurious house. We quickly filled the house with more furniture and all kinds of stuff after we had our baby. Now, we’re tasked with going in the opposite direction and trying to downsize our belongings before transitioning to a more temporary living arrangement lifestyle.  You see, we are a military family, and things are changing to make our lifestyle different than the mostly civilian life I have been used to. My transition into our full-time military life will involve a much more mobile lifestyle and lots of rental properties. To simplify our upcoming and future moves, we need to downsize our amount of stuff and become a little more minimalist.

Tips on Downsizing your Home and Belongings

Downsize your Furniture

The first thing you need to do when you start to downsize your life is to go through every room in your house and make a list of everything you plan to shed. Is your furniture big, bulky, and not easy to move? Sell it before you go.

Sometimes we even have items that are a perfect fit for our current homes only. When we bought our house we actually bought a lot of the previous owner’s furniture. Some of it matches amazingly well, like our dining room chairs to the color of the walls. That set needs to just stay with the house when we leave. We also have a very traditional and large china cabinet and dining room table. It is beautiful and fits great into our dining room, but will not likely fit in most smaller rental houses. So we have decided to sell it and we can always buy a smaller, lighter, more modern set up if we wish to display our collection of plates and cups.

Downsize your stuff

The next step is to consider all the stuff you have accumulated and then decide what is clutter and what is a must keep. Decluttering is a process, but is best done before you move. There will be much less to unpack and find the right place for if you’ve shed items in advance. Figure out what you don’t use at all, what you have that is extra, etc. Decide what to keep from sentimental items.

I’m finding things I didn’t even remember having, so that is a good indication that we should let them go. Do you really use all those office supplies? I know I don’t! What about all those clothes that no longer fit? It might be time to donate them so they can make someone else’s life better, and your home less cluttered.

Make a general plan for any future home

Since the layout of our future homes is completely uncertain, and will not be the same each move, having items that fit well in any space and look good together is key.  That doesn’t mean we won’t want to decorate each home to represent us, but that we want to do so as easily as possible. Classic and neutral pieces work best with small accent pieces, rather than unique items of a different color wood, for example.

Another option to consider is to rent furniture rather than have to move around with large items.  Sometimes it is best to take the easier route, and renting specific furniture items for each new home makes a lot of sense. With CORT Furniture Rental, you can rent furniture for as long as you need to at each new duty location, reducing the hassle of moving. Renting furniture is especially helpful for temporary but long-term living arrangements, which are typical of a military lifestyle. 

What do you do when you need to simplify and downsize your home for a move?