We moved last year and I am still processing it emotionally. Not because anything went catastrophically wrong — nothing did, really — but because nobody warned me that moving with a family is essentially a second full-time job that you do on top of your actual life, while also managing the feelings of several small people who do not understand why their stuff is in boxes and frankly don’t care that you’ve spent three weeks colour-coding a spreadsheet.
I learned a lot. Some of it the hard way. Here is what I wish someone had told me before we started, condensed into something useful rather than a stress spiral.
You Will Do 90% of It
If you are the primary organiser in your household — and statistically speaking, hi, yes, that’s probably you reading this — brace yourself. Moving is the mental load event of the decade. It is a continuous, relentless series of decisions and tasks and phone calls and emails, and most of them will fall to you because most of them always fall to you.
I’m not saying this to be bleak. I’m saying it so you can plan accordingly. Factor in your actual capacity, not the optimistic version of your capacity. Don’t book moving day for the same week as a school event, a work deadline, and a dental appointment — yes, I did this, yes I regret it, moving on.
Give yourself more time than you think you need for everything. Sorting through the kids’ stuff alone will take three times as long as sorting your own, partly because children have an inexplicable attachment to things like a broken crayon they haven’t touched since 2021 and a Happy Meal toy from a restaurant that no longer exists.
August Is a Trap
Everyone moves in August. I mean everyone. HMRC data confirms summer is consistently the peak period for property completions in the UK — because schools, because September, because we are all doing the same thing at the same time like a very stressed flock of birds. The result: removal companies are booked solid, prices go up, and everyone’s solicitor is drowning.
If you have any flexibility on timing at all — any at all — don’t move in August. January or February will get you better availability, lower prices, and a solicitor who might actually answer the phone before 4pm. Yes it’s colder. Yes, unpacking in February is grimmer than unpacking in the sunshine. But moving in August with children while competing with approximately forty thousand other families is a particular kind of chaos that I would not wish on anyone.
If August is non-negotiable — and for a lot of families it is, schools wait for no one — book everything stupidly early. Months early. And mentally prepare for the fact that something will run late.
Sort the Removalist Situation Before Anything Else
My advice: don’t just go with whoever your neighbour used or whoever comes up first when you search. Get a few quotes and actually compare them.
There are several moving platforms like Find a Mover to compare and book removalists without having to ring around individually, which saves time and it could turn out to save actual money too, which is always nice. The difference between quotes for the same job was more than I expected — we’re talking hundreds of pounds, not pennies.
Things worth asking before you commit: what happens if completion is delayed and the van has to sit waiting? (It happens. A lot.) Do they disassemble and reassemble beds? Do they have experience with your route? What’s the insurance situation if something gets damaged? Ask the annoying questions before you sign anything rather than after something goes wrong.
Also: book childcare for moving day. Non-negotiable. Get the kids out of the house if you possibly can. Moving with children present on moving day is — at best — a low-level distraction that slows everything down. At worst, it is a toddler inside a box someone is trying to carry down the stairs while you’re directing a wardrobe around a corner. Learn from my experience.
The Car Is Its Own Whole Thing
If you’re moving any real distance, the question of what to do with the car is one that most people leave until far too late and then panic about.
Driving it yourself sounds like the obvious answer until you’re loading children and their essential items — the specific blanket, the car sick bag, the forty-seven questions about how much longer — into it on top of an already exhausting moving day, and then facing a multi-hour motorway journey. It’s a lot.
Something like VehicleMove can help with vehicle transport so you and the family can travel however works best for you. It sounds like a luxury until you actually price it up and weigh it against the alternative, which is you, three children, and two hours on the M25 on moving day. Sometimes the sane option is worth it.
The Kids’ Rooms Go First
This is the one piece of advice I was given that actually landed. When the van arrives at the new place, direct the removalists to get the children’s bedroom furniture off first. Before the kitchen, before the living room, before your own stuff.
Then, while the rest of the unloading happens, one person sets up the kids’ rooms. Beds made. Familiar things visible. Favourite toy somewhere findable. It doesn’t need to be Pinterest-worthy. It just needs to feel like theirs rather than a storage unit.
Children find moving genuinely unsettling — different sounds, different smells, different everything — and having their own space feel right makes the first night so much more manageable. For everyone. Including you, because a child who has settled is a child who is not climbing into your bed at 2am asking why it smells different.
The Admin Never Ends But You Can Get Ahead of It
There is so much admin. So much. School notifications, GP registration, dentist, NHS records for the kids, council tax, electoral roll, utilities, every subscription you’ve ever signed up for going to your old address for the next six months despite your best efforts.
If your move is complicated — things in storage, staggered dates, moving in stages because life is not simple and neither are house chains — find companies that offer house moving and car transport like Movingle for keeping all the logistical threads in one place. With a family, something always ends up more complicated than planned. Having it organised somewhere that isn’t your brain is a small mercy.
Make the admin list before you move. I mean a proper list, not a mental note. Everything that has your current address — work through it in the first two weeks of being in the new place. It’s not thrilling. Neither is discovering six months later that your child’s medical records are still registered to a house you no longer live in, which I also did, so.
It’s Hard and Then It Gets Better
The first couple of weeks in a new home with children are genuinely harder than the move itself in some ways. Kids regress a bit. Bedtimes get longer. Meltdowns happen over things that are clearly not actually about the thing they appear to be about. Everything is unfamiliar and they are processing it in the way children process things, which is loudly and at inconvenient moments.
This passes. It genuinely does. You introduce the right toys and it can reclaim the outdoor play for your kids, kids are remarkably adaptable when they have consistent people around them even if the surroundings have changed. The things that help most are mundane: same bedtime routine, find the nearest playground and go there twice in the first week, let them have some say in how their room is arranged. Small anchors in unfamiliar territory.
And you will get there too. The bit where the new place stops feeling temporary and starts feeling like home. Where you stop having to think about which drawer the spatula is in. Where you know which bus goes where and which neighbours wave back. It takes longer than you’d like and shorter than you’d fear.
And then you’ll wonder why you were so stressed. Which is easy to say now, obviously, from the other side of it. Ask me again on moving day.