Here Are 17 Tips For Moving House With A Toddler

Aka How To Move With A Toddler, Stress-Free

Are you moving house with a toddler soon? Need some tips on moving house with toddlers? Or just want to know how you’ll survive a house move when you have small children? Clue: remember where you pack the wine.

If you’re moving with a toddler soon, it might seem like a logistical nightmare, but it doesn’t have to be.

Read our tried and tested tips (we moved with a toddler, and spoiler, it all turned out OK).

Yes, We Moved House – With A Toddler In Tow

I think I may have mentioned once or twice that we moved house. We’ve been in for about six weeks now, work is well underway and it feels a lot more like ours at the moment (rather than some random house we just happened across).

We were told lots of genuinely useful info about moving with a toddler, and we picked up loads of tips as we went, so I wanted to write more about our experience of moving with a toddler instead.

Moving Homes – It’s Stressful! (Right?)

Moving house is stressful enough. Actually getting to the moving stage is stressful, especially when house moves take so long and are so precarious.

And then when you have young children, it presents a whole different set of logistical problems. At toddler-age especially, they’re too old not to notice that something massive is going on, yet too young to really understand the whole picture.

Here’s Are Our Best Tips To Prepare When Moving With Small Children:

1. And so, first…The best tip that everyone told us was to hire people to pack as well as move. if you can afford it during what’s an expensive time! It is really, really worth the extra money as it makes things so much easier. Our smallish flat had no extra space to store boxes and dismantled furniture, and Eliza had a habit of running around after us and unpacking which made things tricky.
2. Instead, our packers came in the day before M-Day, packed most things apart from the essentials, then came back the next day for the rest of it (things like a full dishwasher someone forgot to empty. Ahem). Ours were, in fact, so efficient that they even packed up a bag of recycling we’d left and some things we have yet to unearth.
3. Keep all the important things where you know where they are. E.g. make sure the packers don’t pack the iPad charger or TV as you’ll need lots of distractions up your sleeve for your toddler on packing and moving days.
4. Leave the house if you can while they are packing! Go to the park, go for a walk It will stop it being weird that people are in their house and something is obviously up.
5. Be prepared to let your routines go out of the window. It was raining on packing day and we couldn’t go to the park, so we watched an awful lot of Peppa Pig at a point where TV was still strictly rationed.

How We Helped Prepare Our Toddler For Moving House

1. To help prepare our toddler for moving house, we read Moving Molly by Shirley Hughes (a childhood favourite, it’s a classic picture book about a family moving from a city flat to a house, so it seemed apt).
2. We talked about the upcoming house move as much as possible.
3. As we were moving from a flat to a house, we also talked about the new garden as much as possible
4. We discussed the move with her nursery teachers and got them to mention it to her too.

Your Toddler On The Day Of The House Move

1. On the day of the big move, find somewhere else to take them if you can. Luckily, moving day was also a nursery day, so we dropped our toddler off as normal then picked her up in the evening once we’d moved. If no nursery is available, can you drop them off with a relative or friend?
2. Clean the house! Disinfect from the ground up first – my mums tip, to make everywhere safe and clean at a little level. This is especially important if you move into a renovation project, which will probably be old and grubby.
3. Make their room one of the first things you do in the new house. It was the first place we cleaned and we made sure all her familiar things were unpacked and around her when she got home.
4. Buy them a present from the new house. Eliza became the owner of Guppo the cuddly Gruffalo and a Peppa Pig magazine (bought hastily in the shop when we realised the packers had been too efficient and we had no clue where the Gruffalo was). We put these in her room for when she first went in. As she was so excited about the garden, her nursery teacher suggested we buy her a swing or slide for outside.
5. We were also told to keep things the same as much as possible, so we took her back to the old nursery until Christmas (even though it was a massive trek). Prepare for some disruption though, particularly sleep. Especially if they’re teething at the same time. ZzzZzz.
6. We spent a lot of time exploring, going up and down the stairs, finding new places to play and generally trying to make her excited about the new house and garden.

The Best Tip For A Toddler Moving to A New House…

1. And finally, our top tip for moving house with toddlers, a tip for the parents – make sure you know which box the kettle is packed in, have a takeaway on moving in night, and also, WINE.

Once You’ve Read My Post On Moving House With A Toddler, Read My Posts On:

• A colourful toddler room tour,
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• Follow me on Pinterest