Not all moves are long term. In fact, there are many situations where people have to move for only a couple nights, a few weeks or for several months. If you’ve found yourself in one of these situations, you may feel a bit frustrated and confused. After all, what are you supposed to do with all of your belongings?
Fortunately, there are options and it starts with preparation. Whether your house sold before you found a new one, you’re in between a relocation, you accepted a short-term employment opportunity or have taken a month-long trip, here are some tips to help you prepare.
1. Discover What’s Included
The first step to preparing for a temporary, short-term stay is to find out what’s included. In order to do this, you have to find out where you’ll be staying. This is something to consider prior to booking your hotel room, short term rental or other form of temporary stay.
If you don’t want to move all of your furniture and belongings, you need to search for rentals that are fully furnished. Then, you can inquire further to see what else comes with the stay. Just because something is fully furnished doesn’t necessarily mean it’ll have bedding, linens, cutlery, electronics, etc. So, you’ll need to book and inquire.
2. Pack Only What You Need
Once you know what your temporary, short-term rental includes, you can start packing. However, it’s important to only pack what you need. While it’s tempting to pack your entire wardrobe, bookcases of novels and your endless movie collection for a month’s stay, avoid doing so. As a rule of thumb, if you can survive the short stay without it, it doesn’t need to be packed.
Instead, be strategic and plan out how many articles of clothing you’ll need for your stay, what electronics need to make the trip, what type of home décor and furniture needs to come with you, etc.
Additionally, if your short-term rental provides something, there’s no sense in bringing your own. While you may prefer your television set or interior over the one provided, there’s no point in having everything in double.
3. Store the Rest
Now that you have your belongings packed and ready to go to your temporary, short-term stay, you’ll realize that you have even more items left behind. Fortunately, if you don’t want to get rid of them you certainly don’t have to. After all, you’re only going away for a short period of time and you’ll need your belongings before you know it.
For everything else, leave it in a storage unit. This is a much better option than lugging all sorts of things back and forth, and not using any of it. Or worse, selling all of your belongings only to have to repurchased everything in a couple weeks or months which is more of a hassle and expense than anything else.
4. Consider the Climate
Before you start lugging your things into a moving truck en route to your temporary home or storage unit, you have to think about the climate. If you’re storing your clothes, electronics, other valuables and/or materials that are sensitive to climate change, you’ll need to take this into consideration. A damp, cold storage unit can cause all sorts of mold and malfunction on your clothing, electronics and other belongings – and that’s just an example. There are all kinds of temperatures and weather conditions that simply aren’t ideal for common household items.
Think about the climate and consider renting a storage unit that offers climate control to ensure your items will be in good, working condition once you return home.
Now, all you have left to do is to deliver your belongings to their destination. A temporary, short-term stay doesn’t have to put you back to step one. Just store your things appropriately by renting a storage unit, and you can resume normal life as soon as you’re back home.
