My friends and family members know I specialize in relocation services, so they often ask me for my best moving tips.

My favorite room to unpack is the kitchen. I think kitchen utensils are fun, and I love being able to create an amazing meal for my family, so I wanted to give you a few tips for making your kitchen move as easy as possible.

Ready to dig in? Let’s cook up some timesaving ideas!

Start with Your Current Kitchen

Follow this step-by-step process to get your current kitchen ready for moving day, and make your unpacking efforts significantly easier:

  1. If your kitchen is a total disaster, spend some time putting everything away.
  2. While putting stuff away, remove any items that don’t need a ride to the new house (broken items, utensils and small appliances that never get moved). Take those items to Goodwill, or your donation center of choice.
  3. Grab a pad of post-it notes and a sharpie. Open every cabinet and write a few words on the post-it to describe the contents of that cabinet. Use enough words so that you know what’s in there (pots and pans, casserole dishes, everyday plates and dishes, wine glasses, crockpot, etc.).
  4. Repeat this process for all the drawers (towels, cutlery, spices, utensils, etc.). Use a separate post-it note for every drawer and cabinet door, and use two if it’s an especially large cabinet, or you have several categories of stuff in that area.
  5. When you’re done, take all of your post-it notes, put them in a pile, and keep them somewhere safe.
  6. When you get to your new kitchen, decide where everything is going before your kitchen is full of boxes and packing paper. Put your sticky notes on your drawers and cabinets, to assign all your kitchen stuff a new home. Once you start to unpack your kitchen stuff, it will feel like putting a puzzle together!

We offer a similar service to our clients, but we actually take photos of their previous kitchen cabinets, then post those pictures in the new kitchen. That way, our unpacking team knows exactly what they’re looking for and where to put it.  It makes unpacking a kitchen much easier (and usually faster, too!)

Use the Chopping Block to Get Rid of Items You No Longer Need

Ideally, it would be great to declutter and streamline your “stuff” before a move. But let’s be real… sometimes you just don’t have the time. That’s why I recommend using a method I call the “Chopping Block.”

Here’s how it works: You’ve moved to a new house and didn’t really have time to make a lot of decisions about what to keep – you just put everything in boxes and took it to the new place.

As you start to unpack, designate a location in the house (somewhere with some space – maybe the corner of the dining room) to be the Chopping Block. As you unpack, and you come across items you might want to get rid of, put them in the Chopping Block area.

When my husband and I moved in together, we brought 11 spatulas into our relationship. Who needs that many? We also had a yogurt maker that had never been used, a dusty wok, and dozens of other items that hadn’t been used in years.

I piled it all in my Chopping Block area. Then I took a photo, posted it on Facebook, and encouraged my friends to come and get it! They took many of the items, and the rest went to the Denver Rescue Mission. We started life in our new home with less clutter.

Making Your Move Easy and Hassle-Free

Over the next few months, I’m going to be publishing more moving tips here on my blog – so stay tuned for more ways to take the “headache” out of your next move.

Want someone else to handle your move for you? We can help with all aspects of your moving process. We can even bring in a team of organizers who will unpack, organize, and put away all of your items – often in as little as one day! Contact us for a quote today.