A positive move: Dea Jolly's top tips for moving house

From a tiny apartment to a big spacious home, moving house is considered to be one of the top three most stressful life events, right up there with divorce and unemployment. Packing up your belongings and then unpacking and organising them in your new home is a huge disruption to your routine and can be overwhelming.

Whatever negative feelings you have about moving, it is also a fantastic opportunity to cleanse your home, curate and edit your furniture and belongings and be more organised. As with everything, there is a science to it. Here are my top tips for achieving a smooth transition from one home to the next:

1. What is the point of carting boxes of useless items from one house to the next? A few weeks or months before your moving date, begin the process of going through each room of the house and sort through all of your belongings. Create four categories: items to keep;  items for charity; items to sell; items to be disposed of.

This is the perfect time to declutter, so be ruthless. No more hoarding. You don’t need 20 sets of towels or seven cake tins, so give them away to someone who does.

2. Having a good clean-out also highlights what is not working in your routine and what you need to purchase to help your life run more smoothly. Cleaning out the pantry is not only a great opportunity to ditch all of the out of date products hiding in there, but to also create order. Stackable labelled storage containers let you store everything, from flours and sugars to cereal, in plain sight. A dedicated area for electrical kitchen appliances is a must and if your pantry has deep shelving that makes it hard to see what it contains, your local $2 shop or supermarket will have storage baskets that are perfect for all of those spice jars, pasta and rice. The baskets can then be pulled out like a drawer instead of rifling through piles of groceries each time you need the nutmeg. Every room in the house will benefit from extra organisation from shoes in your wardrobe to the paperwork in the study. Howards Storage World has plenty of organisational products to help get every room sorted.

3. The Golden Rule of Moving: If you haven’t worn or used something in the last 12 months, it is time to say goodbye. Moving unearths all sorts of long forgotten items and it goes without saying that if you haven’t missed or thought about using or wearing something in a year or more, chances are you never will. Some items are kept for sentimental or historic reasons such as a wedding dress – these items should be either vacuum packed or packed in sealed boxes and put into storage so as not to take up valuable space in your everyday wardrobe.

4. Moving is the perfect time to reassess and re-edit your furniture and homewares.  Get rid of anything that is broken or that you just don’t love. We all have a “that will do for now” furniture item in our homes, always with the intention of replacing it with something we really love when time or budget permits. Moving can be that perfect time to splurge on something you really love for your new home.

5. Make sure that every box packed has a label with a brief description of what the box contains and which room it belongs in. Even better, purchase some coloured labels and assign a different colour to each room so that it is easy for either you or the removalists to determine which room a box should go to at a glance.

6. Prepare your new home by cleaning it from top to bottom before moving day so that you can put things away immediately once the boxes start to arrive. If you are planning on painting or installing new flooring, do it while the house is empty instead of trying to do it around your belongings later.

7. Don’t forget to pack an overnight bag for each member of the family for those few days in transition. There is nothing worse that searching through endless boxes looking for your toothbrush on your first night in a new house. The disruption to your routine will be much less stressful if everyone has their toiletries, enough clothes and underwear to get through a couple of days before you have had a chance to unpack. Think about meals for this period too – moving can be expensive and the budget might not have room in it for two or three days of take away food, so pack a small box with breakfast cereals, bread, snacks, fruit, crockery and cutlery to get you through.