The First Week After You Move

Every guide to moving ends the moment the truck pulls away, which is strange, because that is the point at which you are standing in an unfamiliar room with forty boxes and no idea where the scissors are.

The first week is its own project. It is not a hard one, but it goes much better with an order of operations, because the instinct — open everything, all at once, until the floor disappears — is exactly wrong.

The principle is simple. Get the house working before you make it nice. Beds, bathroom, kitchen, in that order. Everything else can wait, and most of it should.

A mover smiling as he lifts a labelled box down from the back of a loaded van

Night one: two rooms, and nothing else

Do not try to unpack. You have done a whole day already.

Get the beds up. If the crew assembled them, this is done; if not, this is the one job worth finding a screwdriver for, because the difference between a real bed and a mattress on a floor is the difference between waking up capable and waking up wrecked.

Then the bathroom. Toilet roll, hand soap, towels, toothbrushes, shower curtain. Twenty minutes.

Then find the box marked "open first", make a cup of tea in it, and stop. Order food. Sit on a box. The rest of the house will still be there tomorrow and you will be a different person when you look at it.

If you packed an essentials box the way the moving checklist suggests, tonight is what it was for.

Day two: the kitchen, and only the kitchen

The kitchen is the room that decides whether the week feels like living somewhere or camping somewhere.

Do it properly in one go. Plates and glasses away, cutlery in a drawer, kettle and coffee on the counter, a pan, a chopping board, a knife. Line the shelves if you are going to, because you will not do it later. Put the specialist things — the stand mixer, the good crockery, the fondue set nobody has used since 2014 — straight into a cupboard without ceremony.

Cook something on day two. It is a small thing and it changes the whole atmosphere of the house.

Day two, also: the safety round

Fifteen minutes, and it is the one part of this list I would not skip.

  • Smoke and carbon monoxide alarms. Press the test button on every one. Fit new batteries in all of them today, so they all die on the same day years from now and not at three in the morning one at a time.
  • Locks. Change them or have them rekeyed. You have no idea how many keys to this house exist.
  • The water shut-off, the breaker panel, and the gas valve if there is one. Find them now, in daylight, not with water coming through a ceiling.
  • The garage door manual release — how to open it in a power cut.
  • A fire extinguisher in the kitchen if there is not one.
  • Air filter. Whatever is in the HVAC, replace it. You do not know when it was last done, and in this climate the air handler works most of the year.

Days three and four: the boxes that have a deadline

Some of the admin is genuinely time-limited in Florida, and this is the bit people let slide until it becomes a problem.

Your driver licence and your vehicle registration both have to show the new address within 30 days. That is state law, not a suggestion, and the licence and the registration are two separate updates. The licence address change can be done online; a tag or title address change is done through the tax collector's office. Do them in the same sitting and they take one evening.

While you are in that frame of mind:

  • Voter registration, through your county supervisor of elections.
  • Car insurance — the address is a rating factor, so this one can actually save you money or quietly invalidate something.
  • Home or renters insurance on the new property, active from the day you got the keys.
  • Bank, credit cards, employer payroll, pension, doctor, dentist, vet.
  • USPS forwarding if it is not already running. It is a stopgap, not a solution — it buys you a year to find everything you forgot.
  • Schools, if that is not already done.

Keep a list on the fridge of every piece of post that arrives addressed to the previous occupant, and every one that arrives for you at the old address. Those two lists tell you exactly what is left to change.

Days three to five: utilities, and the ones people forget

Electricity, water and internet were presumably switched before you arrived. The rest tends to get discovered:

  • Rubbish and recycling — collection days and, in some cities here, whether you need to request bins. Nothing announces a new arrival like the only house on the street with bins out on the wrong day.
  • Rubbish that is not rubbish — find out now where bulk pickup and yard waste sit, because you are about to generate a fortnight of cardboard.
  • Water quality and the softener, if the house has one.
  • HOA — portal login, dues schedule, what the rules actually say about vehicles, fences, paint colours and the bins.
  • Pest control. This is Florida. A quarterly service is not a luxury here.

Day five onward: unpack in the order you use things

By now the essential rooms work, so the rest can go at whatever pace suits you. Two rules make it much less miserable.

One room at a time, finished. Half-unpacking four rooms leaves you with four rooms full of boxes. Finishing one leaves you with a room. Psychologically these are not remotely the same.

Break the boxes down as you go. Flatten and stack them by the door the moment they are empty. Cardboard expands to fill a house. If you used a mover who takes them back, ask — many do, and it is the easiest disposal there is.

The rooms in order of impact: bedrooms, then living room, then the office if you work from home, then wardrobes, then the garage. The garage will take three months. Everyone's garage takes three months.

The walls can wait

There is a strong urge in week one to hang pictures and buy things. Resist it for a fortnight.

You do not yet know which corner gets the afternoon sun, where the draught from the vent lands, which door bangs, or where you will actually end up sitting. Live in the rooms first and decide after. Almost everyone who hangs everything in week one moves half of it in month two.

The one exception is curtains or blinds in the bedrooms. Do those immediately.

Things worth doing in the first week that nobody tells you

  • Meet two neighbours. Not a social project — a practical one. They know which day the bins go out, which pest company everyone uses, and where the water main is.
  • Walk the block in the evening. You learn more about a neighbourhood in one evening walk than in a month of driving in and out of the garage.
  • Find your evacuation zone if you are new to the area, and your nearest urgent care. Five minutes each, on a calm day.
  • Take photographs of every room while it is empty or nearly empty, especially if you are renting. Date-stamped evidence of the condition you received the place in is worth a great deal at the other end of a lease.
  • Register with a doctor and a vet before you need one.
  • Note anything damaged. If something arrived broken, tell your mover promptly rather than at the end of the month — every claims process has a window, and the beginning of it is a much easier conversation than the end.

If a week of this sounds like too much

It is a lot on top of a move, particularly if you are working through it or doing it alone.

Unpacking is a service for exactly that reason — boxes emptied, contents put away, cardboard taken out — and it is booked alongside the move rather than added afterwards. Packing and unpacking covers what that includes, and should you hire packers? is the honest version of when it is worth it.

We cover Orlando, Oviedo, Altamonte Springs, Orange County and the rest of Central Florida.

(407) 987-2624.