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How To Successfully Downsize Your Household To Get Ready For A Move

by Daniel Herrera

Recent studies have found excessive clutter in your home can increase your stress and negatively affect your health. As you prepare for an upcoming move, it is a good time to declutter your home to get rid of things you no longer use or need and improve your health. Packing will also go much quicker when you have less items to pack up and a moving sale can help you with this. Here are four tips to help you declutter to prepare for and have a great moving sale before your relocation.

Discover Items You No Longer Need

When life is busy, it can be easy to accumulate piles of things, then shove them into boxes, shelves, and drawers so you don't have to deal with them. Moving is the perfect time to go through all your home's accumulation spots to decide what items you don't need. You may find that you have items you had completely forgotten about. If you didn't even know you had something, take it as a sign you don't need the item.

Go through your home and look at each item to decide if you want to keep it. Keep only the items you truly love and discard the others. This process of selecting the items you want to keep rather than the items you want to discard may help you simplify the discarding process. Fill a garbage bag with items to throw away and make a pile of items you can sell at your moving sale.

Prepare for the Sale

Start collecting empty grocery bags for your moving sale a week or two before your sale. It can be helpful to have some empty bags on hand for your customers to carry their sale items home in. Also, prepare for cash sales at your moving sale by getting extra cash at the bank so you can make change for customers. Get plenty of quarters, one dollar bills, and five dollar bills. If you don't have the right change at your moving sale a customer may end up walking away from a potential sale.

It can be a good idea to offer snacks and homemade treats at your moving sale. One or two days before your moving sale bake some cookies, cupcakes, and brownies to sell. Baking up some treats can help you use some of your pantry items and make packing your pantry easier. If you have children, they can set up a treat table and sell these homemade treats and some cold beverages to customers. If your moving sale will take place when the weather is hot, ice-cold drinks can be a tempting purchase for your customers and earn you some extra money. 

Post Directional Signs

One of the most important details to carry out a successful moving sale is posting directional signs. Don't bother posting signs with the address to your moving sale. Sale-goers aren't going to try to remember or write down the address to your home, then try to find it. Make each sign simple with the words "Moving Sale" and a large arrow to indicate the direction to turn at a cross street. It also helps if you make all your directional signs the same bright color so they are easy to spot. 

Post these directional signs at all entrances to your neighborhood from the main access roads, then at each turn in your neighborhood on the route to your home. This will ensure sale-goers looking for your moving sale will be able to follow the directional signs through your neighborhood, right to your home. The directional signs will act as a breadcrumb trail through your neighborhood. 

Display Your Items

You should have plenty of display tables for all the smaller items you will be selling at your moving sale. Your customers may not want to bend or squat down to pick an item off the ground or a blanket at your sale. Make the items for sale accessible and convenient. The tables will also allow you to arrange items so everything can be viewed. Customers are less likely to rummage through a box full of items and may pass up something that they will buy from you. Larger, big-ticket items can be set out at the front of the sale to attract buyers.

Use these four tips to help your moving sale become a success, and check out sites like http://www.midwestmoving.com to find professional movers to assist you.

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