By Ian Pearson

Moving into a new home is always a stressful, hasty and emotional process, which tends to cause a lot of confusion. The greatest problem with this lies in the fact that you aren’t just moving your living space, but your home as well, which is a delicate matter to say the very least. So, in order to provide your home with a smooth transition and in order to make sure your belongings are safe and well placed, here are six things you absolutely must do after a move to a new home.

  1. Change the Locks

The number one item on your list needs to be changing the locks on your home. Sure, your landlord may seem as a trustworthy person, but A) you just met them and B) you don’t know who else has the key. Any previous tenant may have duplicated their key to your home and then gave them away to their friends, previous partners and family members. Needless to say, you don’t want the safety of your family and your property to depend on the honesty of these strangers. Because of this, the first thing you need to do after a move is to contact a reliable local locksmith.

  1. Clean The Place

A similar thing goes for hygiene as well. You see, no matter how immaculate the place seems, not every hazardous chemical or material is visible to the naked eye. What you need to do is clean the place as thoroughly as you can, either on your own or with the help of a professional. If you decide to go with the first option, keep in mind that this is your home now, so you don’t want to pollute it with toxic commercial cleaners. Stick to the homemade solutions made with ingredients such as soapy water, bleach, vinegar, baking soda and lime.

  1. Check if Everything Is There

Moving your home can be potentially expensive as well, so you may want to try to minimize the chance of losing an important heirloom (or anything else for that matter) as best as you can. Try to organize all your tinier belongings in boxes and then label them accordingly. As for the furniture pieces, your safest bet probably lies in hiring a supercheap storage solutions unit for the time being.

  1. Inspect the Utilities

During the purchase, it is ideal if you can bring a commercial plumber and an electrician to check the home’s installation, however, now it’s time for you to familiarize with them as well. For starters, you need to learn where is the home’s main water valve and where is the circuit breaker. It would also be quite useful if you were to know where are all the key household switches so that you can localize any potential leak before it causes a serious problem.

  1. Personalize Your New Living Space

Placing your old furniture inside of this new environment might be enough to make you feel at home, but there are other ways to achieve this effect as well. For instance, most moving experts advise introducing your family memorabilia as soon as you can. One of the things you could do is hang all those pictures from vacations and field trips everywhere around the house. Display the art project of your kids in the living room and choose a special spot for that armchair you inherited from grandma. Overall, try to transform this house into a home.

  1. Take a Stroll Around the Neighborhood

Prior to the purchase of the home, you must have already done a research of the area, but now it’s time to do so in person. Go out and introduce yourself to the neighbors, take a stroll few blocks around your home and try to spot all the places you are going to need as the new resident. We are talking about parks, bars, restaurants, bookstores, hardware stores and similar places. Keep in mind that you don’t have to find all of them in a single walk.

In Conclusion

Reducing all your move-in-related efforts to the above-listed six is a bit of an oversimplification, however, each of the above-mentioned items more than earns their place here. Skipping any of them means putting your family in danger, making your cohabitation in this new environment more difficult or simply prolonging your time of acclimation to the new home. In other words, these six tips are here to make your life simpler.

Ian Pearson

Author Bio: Ian Pearson could be tagged also as a passionate sports fan, nature and photography enthusiast, always trying to keep up to date with tech innovations and development.