Baby's New Car - Compliments of His Siblings :-)
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Here is a completely pointless post. Well, it’s likely to make me feel better, but I’m sure it will accomplish little else.
I needed to deposit some money into a checking account to cover a debit that will be coming out this week. We normally do everything electronically, such as direct deposits and automatic transfers, so going to the bank is not the norm for us. Perhaps this is the reason for my false expectations.
It was the 25th and the charge will be on the 29th. Electronic transfers can take 3 days or more with the banks in question and I have completely given up on the chance of ever depositing a check and getting access to my money within a reasonable time frame. Everything is held, no matter what, and things that are “up to the teller’s discretion” never work in our favor.
Nutella Cupcakes with Nutella Cream Cheese
So then she said, “You’ll have to buy something else and try again.” However, she’s already given me my receipt and started scanning the groceries of the guy behind me, so I have to go around. Ugh! So I think, well, I’ll get the kids some gum. That will be fine. I walked around and all 4 lines are 5 people deep! I don’t know where the heck they came from, but there they were, guaranteeing me a good 15 more minutes before I could get out of the store with my $50. Mind you, I’m trying to get to the bank before 3pm so that the deposit is credited the same day.
The thought of waiting in line with 4 kids AGAIN for 15 minutes is not appealing, so I wrangled them all and headed over to the customer service area to just use the dang ATM. I’ll pay the $1.50 just to get on my way. And there it is. A big sign that says, “Out of Order”. Of course it is. Why would it be anything else?
Well, I wasn’t going back in that line and couldn’t get any money there, so I decided that I’d just head over to Bank B where I have an account and where I intend to deposit this $50 if I can ever get it. I figured I’d just do the drive up ATM and then go around again to the drive-up teller window. The kids would be happy in the car for a little bit and it shouldn’t take too long. Yeah, well, in a perfect world.
Bank B only has a walk up ATM, so I parked the car, unloaded the kiddos and walked up to the ATM. Here, I paid $3 to Bank B to take out my money from Bank A just so that I could give it right back to Bank B, where I am a customer with several accounts, including the checking account into which I will deposit this stupid $50.
Back to the car, buckle up and drive around to the teller window. I could have walked in, but at least in the car there are toys and windows I can close when the children who are so done with this “quick trip” start to revolt.
So around to the drive-up teller to deposit my funds. The rest was remarkably uneventful, thank goodness.
This experience just proves that doing everything electronically and over the internet is just the best way to go, as long as you don’t cut your dates too short like I did this time! I’m sorry face-to-face world, but you’ll have to do a lot better than this to win me back from the convenience of the cyber world. Doing things in person is just such a hassle!
Do you prefer to do your banking and bill paying in person or online? What about your shopping?
This is a continuation of our series, ‘Moving With Kids: How To Survive Showing Your House’. If you haven’t done so already, you may want to read parts 1-5 first.
Moving With Kids: How To Survive Showing Your House (Part 1)
Moving With Kids: How To Survive Showing Your House (Part 2)
Moving With Kids: How To Survive Showing Your House (Part 3)
Moving With Kids: How To Survive Showing Your House (Part 4)
Moving With Kids: How To Survive Showing Your House (Part 5)
Communicate your plan
If there’s one thing I’ve learned in business is that communication is key and almost no one (in business) seems to know how to do it! The greatest plan every conceived will fail miserably if the people who are supposed to execute it don’t know about it or understand it.
Through the house preparation process, you will no doubt be explaining to everyone the different categories and what you will do with them and for how long. The next thing to communicate is your plan for when it’s time to show the house. Make sure that all family members know the following
- What items need to be stashed in each room
- Where the designated stash spaces are for each item (it’s best not to put things in a different place every time)
- What the tidying jobs are
- What the cleaning jobs are
- What to lock/unlock
- Which lights are to be left/turned on
The lock/unlock item may require a little explanation. We normally keep the doors to the attic, basement and garage locked, but these should be unlocked so that prospective buyers can see all of the areas of the house. We also have childproofing devices on everything but our belly buttons these days and man are some of those hard to work! Especially hard are the doorknob covers. We have a few different styles and some are easier, but most are just a pain. We take these off and stash them so we don’t aggravate our “guests”. Then we have some lockable file cabinets that we use to store valuables. We always make sure to lock those before we leave.
Lists are very helpful for preparing the house, especially in the beginning. If everyone is participating, you will also find that some people might handle the same jobs every time or are good at one thing over another. Especially with the kids, if there is something they like doing, make that their designated job! One of the most important management tasks is to learn what your people like/do well and let them do it. It will make the process much smoother. If you do decide on some assigned tasks, update that list! We all have good days and bad and take it from me, holding your house open every weekend will take a toll. Every person is going to have a day when they are just not in to it, so that list will help you all stay focused on the plan.
Stay tuned for Part 7 of this series…
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Read the whole series:
Moving With Kids: How To Survive Showing Your House (Part 1)
Moving With Kids: How To Survive Showing Your House (Part 2)
Moving With Kids: How To Survive Showing Your House (Part 3)
Moving With Kids: How To Survive Showing Your House (Part 4)
Moving With Kids: How To Survive Showing Your House (Part 5)
Moving With Kids: How To Survive Showing Your House (Part 6)
Moving With Kids: How To Survive Showing Your House (Part 7)
Moving With Kids: How To Survive Showing Your House (Part 8)
This is a continuation of our series, ‘Moving With Kids: How To Survive Showing Your House’. If you haven’t done so already, you may want to read parts 1-4 first.
Moving With Kids: How To Survive Showing Your House (Part 1)
Moving With Kids: How To Survive Showing Your House (Part 2)
Moving With Kids: How To Survive Showing Your House (Part 3)
Moving With Kids: How To Survive Showing Your House (Part 4)
Develop Your Plan
Now that you have those categories identified, you need to figure out how you are going to deal with each of them.
The ‘Gotta Go!’ Category
If you are like most of us, this will include things that need to be thrown out, give-aways, donations and things you could sell.
Throw out the stuff that is just junk. This can be the hardest part if you are attached to things that have memories but are of little use or value to anyone. Buck up and decide what you really have to get rid of and just do it!
Think about family and friends who may be able to use the stuff that’s in good shape. Don’t pass up the opportunity to help them out. Some folks don’t like to take used things, but others really appreciate being able to save on a few things for a new place or new baby.
For donations, contact your local thrift shops or other charities to find out what items they will take. Be sure to find out any requirements they have for the condition of used items. And don’t forget your receipt if you itemize your deductions on your income tax!
You may not want the hassle of trying to sell any of the things that have value, but this is certainly an option that could make a few extra bucks that might come in handy. Check out your local consignment stores, online auction sites, local and online classified ad resources to help find buyers for all of your still ultra cool stuff!
Long-Term Storage, Short-Term Storage and Seasonal Categories
These will all basically be stored, but depending on what you have available to you, they may not all be in the same place. In our case, we had significant storage space on our property, but we were very short on actual living space. We needed to free up the on-site storage for the things we needed close at hand, so we rented a storage unit of the appropriate size to store all 3 of these categories. If you can find a family member who is willing to let you store things at their place and you are comfortable with this, go for it! Any money saving options are a real plus. Figure out how much space you will need and where you can get it. Next, decide which categories will go where, depending on how likely you are to need them and how easy they will be to access in a given location.
If you haven’t done so already, now would be a good time to checkout our earlier post, subscribe to our RSS feed!
Read the whole series:
Moving With Kids: How To Survive Showing Your House (Part 1)
Moving With Kids: How To Survive Showing Your House (Part 2)
Moving With Kids: How To Survive Showing Your House (Part 3)
Moving With Kids: How To Survive Showing Your House (Part 4)
Moving With Kids: How To Survive Showing Your House (Part 5)
Moving house is a huge project! The complexity varies with house size, family size and the amount of stuff you have, but I would dare say that something gets lost with every move.
In our case, we had a giant move on our hands with a ton of work to be done before we could show the house. You can read the entire series, “Moving With Kids: How To Survive Showing Your House”, to find out just how big it was.
We started packing up some of the really long-term things the year before we listed. We expected our move to be a long, drawn out affair. This meant that many of our belongings were going to be stored for a very long time. I needed a way to keep us organized and make sure we could find things if we needed them.
Packing Inventory Book
I created a log book where I entered every box that we packed up. I noted the contents of the box and the label that I had assigned to it. For longer term projects, it also helps to date the entry so that if you do have to go searching for a box in a storage unit, you have an idea of where it should be in relation to other boxes.
Organize Your Boxes
Make sure that you pack like things together or you will create a new nightmare of a different flavor. These groupings should be things that make sense to you. If you’ll likely look for things based on where they used to be located, group them that way. You may also want to group all of one kind of thing together.
For example, you could box up the contents of a cupboard together and note in the book that it contains “all the stuff from [place A]“. I grouped the books we packed up by the room/shelf they were on where possible. That way I don’t have to list individual items, but rather “books from tall living room bookcase”. Now, I ended up with several boxes with that notation, but each box contained books that had been stored together on the same shelf, or very near one another. This really does make it easier to find things. When the box is opened, you’ll see them and be able to say, “oh these are the ones we had on the top shelf so it should be in here”. Other groupings were things like, “Family Sandals”, “Winter Boots”, etc. These were especially helpful when we were swapping out our seasonal boxes from the storage unit through the ordeal.
For very important things or those that you think may get lost in the shuffle, make a special note in the book that they are contained in the listed box. I did this when I packed up some of the kitchen things that I thought I might need to get at right away after the move.
Labeling System
Being the super careful person that I am, I didn’t feel comfortable labeling the boxes themselves with their actual contents. When we started packing, we didn’t know where we were going to end up, so labeling boxes with their destination room didn’t make sense. So, I made up alpha codes for certain types of items and then appended a number to it that just kept incrementing with each new box.
I’ll give you an example of how this worked. We do lots of crafts in our house, so there was a lot to pack. The prefix code CFT was used for those boxes, so starting at 1 they were CFT1, CFT2, CFT3, and so on. In our old house, we had a nice little crawl space right off our laundry room in the basement where we kept much of the craft stuff. In one house we looked at, there was a small basement room that looked ideal for crafts. In another, the master bedroom was large enough that I could put a little sewing area in an alcove. So, where the boxes went was very dependent on which house we ended up in. With this system, you don’t need to know when you pack. Just use your inventory book on moving day to direct the boxes to the appropriate rooms. Our craft category contained general crafts, kids’ crafts and my sewing stuff, so using the book, I could split that out between rooms or send it all to the same place, depending on the new house layout. Plus, I found it so much easier to just put a few characters on each box rather than writing the contents or room names.
Organize the Storage Unit
A few things about storage units first. Do yourself a favor and get a climate controlled unit if at all possible. For our long-term needs, we wanted to be able to store anything and not worry about it getting ruined. It was also one of those places where you drive right inside the building to your unit. It was very clean and secure. We did get a unit with 2 different doors, so that we had better access given our circumstances. We knew it would be pretty full because we didn’t get an overly large unit (to save money), so a single door on a stuffed unit would have been too difficult.
We used a systematic approach to the packing, which led to a much more organized storage unit. We packed the longer term stuff first and this went into storage first. As time went on, we moved on to the short-term and then seasonal categories and these went into the storage unit in that order. This way, the more likely a box was to be needed, the closer it was to the outside, and easier to access.
The labeling system, specifically the incrementing numbers, did help with locating boxes later. We had to go looking for things many, many times over the course of the year. As we picked through the boxes, the numbering helped us figure out if we were heading in the right direction – like an annoying game of Hot and Cold!
Moving Day!
All this nonsense leading up to the big day! Whether you are using movers, friends or just going DIY, you’ll appreciate your packing inventory on this day. You are not likely to want to dump every box into the house all at once. There are things like cleaning carpets, painting and perhaps some other small jobs that you’ll want to take care of before you move everything in. The log book will help you direct the right boxes into the house versus to the garage or storage shed for a later date. For those boxes that do go into the living space, you can easily get them to the proper rooms.
Now keep that book handy because you’re going to need it until you have everything unpacked! There is nothing more frustrating than not being able to find things in the new house. Are you sure you packed it? Did we forget a box? Did we leave something in the truck? Save yourself the headache and try a packing inventory book the next time you move!
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Ummmm, well, not exactly, but you might think so based on the kids’ response to this one!
If you’ve been reading our series on “Moving With Kids: How To Survive Showing Your House”, you know that we recently did some major cleaning out to prepare for moving. (If not, you can read it here.)
We found lots of things that we really should have gotten rid of a long time ago, but since we started this business on top of having 4 kids, well, things are a little bit crazy. We frequently opted to just stash things in the attic to get them out of the way rather than think about what we should really do with them.
However, being the sentimental fools that we are, a lot of it was kept intentionally. We don’t go overboard on the kids’ birthdays, but we do indulge them with a theme, be it a color combination or a character they like. We don’t go crazy with all of the insanely expensive wall hangings and other things, but we do get matching plates, napkins and plastic table cover. We also get them balloons, including 1 mylar balloon that goes with the theme.
Well, one of us (not me!) wanted to keep mementos of the kids’ birthday parties. Sounds harmless, but this turned in to keeping one of everything — a plate, a napkin, the flattened mylar balloon WITH the curling ribbon strings still on them and even the now melty, twisty shaped candles that were on the cake! This turned in to stashing away all of the leftovers from the party. For the last 10 years! Well, we found 2 large boxes in the attic containing the leftover stuff from 28 different parties! Here’s a puzzle — If we have 4 kids and have had 28 parties over 10 years, how old are they? LOL Oh wait, one of these was for Daddy, so 27 were for the kids.
Party Every Day All Summer Long
Well, all fun aside, we did both agree that we really don’t need to keep all that stuff. We chucked all the things that were trash and saved the plates and napkins. Then we still had a huge pile of anywhere from 1-5 plates of each theme and even more napkins. We had a few ideas of what to do with them, but decided to liven up lunchtime during the summer.
Everyone gets to choose the theme they want for their lunch each day. When it’s gone, it’s gone and no pouty faces! So far so good on that! We haven’t had any fights over it yet. And I can feed them their boring healthy lunches and they tell me how much better they taste on these fun plates. The photo above is what’s still left, so I’m pretty confident we have the entire summer covered!
If I really want to make it special, I let them eat outside on the deck at the kids’ table. They get such a kick out of such a simple thing that takes little to no effort! It’s nice to have those kinds of things in your pocket when you’re trying to make things fun. And I don’t know about you, but I don’t tell them what a breeze it is for me!
So, we’re pretty proud of having turned 2 boxes of junk into a daily treat for this summer!
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This is a continuation of our series, ‘Moving With Kids: How To Survive Showing Your House’. If you haven’t done so already, you may want to read parts 1-3 first.
Moving With Kids: How To Survive Showing Your House (Part 1)
Moving With Kids: How To Survive Showing Your House (Part 2)
Moving With Kids: How To Survive Showing Your House (Part 3)
Categorize Your Belongings
If you are a growing family, you may have found yourself suddenly bursting at the seams in your current house. If you are like me, you keep finding creative ways to use the space you have and keeping it ultra organized makes it work. When it’s time to sell, you are going to have some tough decisions to make because most likely, you will need to clear out a lot of things. When you are living in every inch of the space you have, you will need to get a lot of the stuff out of the house completely.
Realistically, you should plan for 6 months, and know that it could end up being longer before you close and move. We recommend thinking of your “stuff” in 6 different categories. You will use these categories to figure out where certain things will be put for the duration.
Gotta Go! – Things that you should have gotten rid of a long time ago because you just don’t need them anymore. These can be sold, given away to friends and family or donated, but just get them out of your precious space! And yes, some of it really is just trash. In our attic, we found the ‘couple of boxes of textbooks’ that I knew were up there and was keeping intentionally. Immediately after college, I didn’t know if I might need/want them. However, after …. let’s just say at least 2 decades and leave it at that …. and I haven’t touched them, I figured it was pretty safe to toss them. Well, the memory is a funny thing because after digging them all out, it was actually about 14 boxes (you know, the paper boxes that you buy a case of copier paper in?) of textbooks, workbooks and notebooks with what looked like every bit of coursework I ever did!
Long-Term Storage – Things that you don’t use now, but will use later. These are things that you definitely want to keep, but can’t put to use now in your small space. For example, furniture that you are saving for the extra rooms in your new house. We had quite a few pieces that were passed down from relatives or got squeezed out of other rooms to make room for baby gear. We knew we would want these again once we were done with things like the playpen, the swing and big, bulky baby toys.
Short-Term Storage – Things that family members feel they can give up for that 6 month window, knowing that they will get them back. Probably the biggest impact for us was to skinny down our book collection. We love to read and collect books so everyone, even the kids, have tons of books. We decided to keep the books we used most often and the ones that the kids were likely to grow in to over the coming year or what they might need for school. This was about 20% of our collection. The rest was designated for storage.
Clearing out the books emptied several of our bookshelves as well. Since we didn’t have any built-ins, we put some in storage and re-purposed others for things that needed to stay and would look tidy on the shelves. Since you don’t want bookshelves to be packed full, we spread things out among a few to lighten them up. Honestly, when staged this way, there is so little on the shelves that it looks like you don’t even need the bookshelf in the first place, but who am I to argue? We just needed to sell our house!
Seasonal – Items that you don’t use all year round. Being in such close quarters, I had to resort to maintaining what I call ‘off-season buckets’ for each family member. We didn’t have enough closet or drawer space to keep everything in the bedrooms, so we would just swap out our spring/summer and fall/winter clothes twice a year. I kept the buckets in the basement laundry room so that if we needed to get anything for unseasonable weather, it wasn’t a problem. In preparation for the move, we just expanded this to include all seasonal things. Think about seasonal toys, kitchen items, shoes and outerwear.
Rotation/Overflow – Swap Out and Overflow Items. These are things such as toys that you can rotate for the kids and the extra stuff that doesn’t fit in the rooms anymore. This is the same as you may have done for your toddler, but just expand it to include each family member, even the adults. Every little bit helps!
The Keepers – The stuff that will remain in the living areas of your home while you show your house. And don’t make the mistake that we did! Be sure to reserve some items that you can use to stage your home. I figured that we would be so involved with the house selling process that we wouldn’t need any of the nice dishes or decorative items, so I packed them. Then when my real estate agent started talking about staging and what we could put here and there, I thought of a whole bunch of things that would look great, but were packed for the long term.
Stay tuned for Part 5 of this series…
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Read the whole series:
Moving With Kids: How To Survive Showing Your House (Part 1)
Moving With Kids: How To Survive Showing Your House (Part 2)
Moving With Kids: How To Survive Showing Your House (Part 3)
Moving With Kids: How To Survive Showing Your House (Part 4)
Moving With Kids: How To Survive Showing Your House (Part 5)
Moving With Kids: How To Survive Showing Your House (Part 6)
Moving With Kids: How To Survive Showing Your House (Part 7)
Moving With Kids: How To Survive Showing Your House (Part 8)
This is a continuation of our series, ‘Moving With Kids: How To Survive Showing Your House’. If you haven’t done so already, you may want to read parts 1 and 2 first.
Moving With Kids: How To Survive Showing Your House (Part 1)
Moving With Kids: How To Survive Showing Your House (Part 2)
Discuss the Process
Explain the buying and selling process to your kids. Do this in short, easy to understand steps. The preparing of the house, the showing, the open houses, the searching for a home, the offers, the counter offers. You should explain things in a way that is appropriate for their age, but you can still help them understand each step, even at a very high level. My 10 yr. old daughter is actually totally clear on the difference between contingent and non-contingent offers and which one a seller really wants!
Make sure you let your kids know that buying/selling a home is a long process, sometimes longer than you would like, but using terms like “a little while”, “not for long” and “a few days” is not wise because they suggest a fairly short-term thing. While it may be relatively short for adults, it can seem like an eternity for kids. (Sometimes it seems this way for adults too!) Moving can be a very emotional and stressful time for kids, so we want to give them the right expectations up front. When they understand the steps and that it’s a long process, they can watch for the milestones and take comfort in knowing that things are moving along.
Explain the why’s of preparing your house. Remember our recommendations from Part 2 of this series? If the kids have seen the houses you’ve been looking at, it will be easy to compare your home to those other houses. Remind them of the lack of clutter, the tidy kids’ rooms, the very clean bathrooms, etc. Ask them what they would think if they walked into a house that looked messy or had grunge in this place or that. Would they want to live there? Then walk through your own house with them, looking at the house as if you were thinking of buying it. This will really help everyone see the areas that need your attention.
As you discuss the steps, remember to highlight the positive things about moving and getting the house ready to sell. Try to make it sound like fun and an adventure you will be on together. Again, the age of your kids will determine the kind of approach that is likely to work, but you get the idea. Most of it is tedious and not high on the list of things we would choose to do with our free time, but it must be done and you have to find a way. Believe it or not, we ended up having some really good quality time with our kids and they have learned quite a lot through the process. We were pretty shocked when the kids commented on how nice it was to live in the house with it being picture perfect all the time. We all agreed that it wasn’t fun to do the work to keep it that way, but even they were able to appreciate it!
If you enjoyed this post, we welcome you to subscribe to our RSS feed!
Read the whole series:
Moving With Kids: How To Survive Showing Your House (Part 1)
Moving With Kids: How To Survive Showing Your House (Part 2)
Moving With Kids: How To Survive Showing Your House (Part 3)
Moving With Kids: How To Survive Showing Your House (Part 4)
Moving With Kids: How To Survive Showing Your House (Part 5)
Moving With Kids: How To Survive Showing Your House (Part 6)
Moving With Kids: How To Survive Showing Your House (Part 7)
Moving With Kids: How To Survive Showing Your House (Part 8)
The Power of the Doorway Jumper - 3 out of 4 Ain't Bad!
Please take a moment to link up! We’d love to check out your prized photos. After you link up, leave a comment and visit these other great sites!
This is a continuation of our series, ‘Moving With Kids: How To Survive Showing Your House’. If you haven’t done so already, you may want to read Part 1 first.
Take the Kids to See Other Houses
Yes, this can be painful for sure, but it’s important that the kids see the process in action. Taking them to houses that have already been prepared (and yes, some staged) for showing will help the kids look at your home through different eyes. Figure out if YOUR kids will do better with private showings where just you and your realtor are present or if taking them to open houses is the best choice.
As a parent, you have no doubt seen just how much a child can take in while participating in a particular activity. Call their attention to how great things look in the house with all the things put away and everything is clean. Notice the clear counters, tidy bookshelves and how everything looks in its place and the kids will too.
There is extra impact when they see other kids’ rooms that are spit spot. When they come home from play dates, mine frequently tell me what a mess the other kids’ rooms are and they don’t seem to like it. If you can get them to really see the rooms of your house the way outsiders will, you should be able to take advantage of that natural aversion they feel when they see a friend’s messy room.
This important step of looking at houses together will help your kids understand the goal of the big job you have ahead of yourselves. Having that visual idea in mind will make it much easier to achieve. They may even take ownership of their own room once they realize that strangers will be coming in and looking around. My eldest took great pride in how her room looked for every open house. It also gave her a sense of control over part of this unnerving process where very little is in your control. She was very impressed with herself and knew that she was really helping with this big project.
If you enjoyed this post, we welcome you to subscribe to our RSS feed!
Read the whole series:
Moving With Kids: How To Survive Showing Your House (Part 1)
Moving With Kids: How To Survive Showing Your House (Part 2)
Moving With Kids: How To Survive Showing Your House (Part 3)
Moving With Kids: How To Survive Showing Your House (Part 4)
Moving With Kids: How To Survive Showing Your House (Part 5)
Moving With Kids: How To Survive Showing Your House (Part 6)
Moving With Kids: How To Survive Showing Your House (Part 7)
Moving With Kids: How To Survive Showing Your House (Part 8)
