Every year, tens of millions of people move into a new house (25.6 million in 2023, which was actually a record low). People move for a wide range of reasons—a new job, a growing family, to be closer to family—but one thing is universally true: It can be a miserable experience. Packing up a house you’ve lived in for years is in itself a major project—and when you’re done with that, you get the joy of lugging all that stuff to your new space, which quickly fills up with boxes and chaos.
Hiring professional movers instead of bribing your incompetent friends is a good first step toward a less stressful house move, of course. But if you’re still dreading all the sweat and uncertainty that comes with moving, you can spend a little extra money and hire a bunch of services specifically designed to make moving a lot easier.
Many moving companies offer professional packing as part of their services, so you can usually just add it on when you hire movers. If you’re planning to move yourself but just want someone to pack for you, you can usually pay for separate packing services from movers or junk removal companies, and you can also find these services on platforms like TaskRabbit.
Cost: About $60 an hour.
One of the most frustrating things that can happen during a house move is arriving at your new digs and realizing you forgot to have the utilities turned on, or made a mistake scheduling your internet, or completely forgot to file a change of address with the post office.
If you’re planning a move, it’s worth the time to check to see if a utility concierge service is available. These services (a few examples are Move Concierge, Porch Utilities, or Utility Hound) partner with utility companies to handle transferring your accounts and making sure services are turned on when you move in, usually at no cost to you. They’ll also sometimes offer services like handling your change of address and mail forwarding or re-keying locks.
Cost: $0.
Your new home might be pristine when you arrive—you also might walk into a cesspool of filth that makes you think a family of wild animals lived there instead of human beings. If you have to deep clean your home and possibly perform an exorcism before you can even begin moving in your stuff, that delay can cause stress and throw your schedule off. Hiring a cleaning company that offers one-time move-in cleaning services ensures that you’ll be moving into a livable space and can concentrate on where to put the sofa instead of strapping on protective gear and sandblasting someone else’s funk off the walls.
Cost: About $225.
Another service that will save your sanity during a house move is professional TV and art hanging. Making sure your TV is mounted correctly—in the right spot for viewing and certain to not fall off the wall—requires a little skill and planning, as does getting all those framed pictures level and properly arranged on the walls, so adding this service on from your movers or finding a company that specializes in these installation services is well worth the cost. You can also usually find folks for this on TaskRabbit, Thumbtack, or similar platforms.
Cost: TV mounting: About $100-200; Picture hanging: About $40-$170
Another service you can often add on from your moving company or find on platforms like TaskRabbit is furniture disassembly and reassembly. If you’d rather not spend hours trying to shift stubborn screws and reverse-engineer every stick of furniture in your home, then keep track of all the parts, then put it all back together after an exhausting trip to your new home, why not hire someone to take care of all that for you?
Cost: About $150-$200.
There’s a decent chance that your new home doesn’t have the same layout as your current home, which means you might not have room for all of your stuff immediately. Furniture might not fit the new space, and the closets might look a lot smaller once you actually start filling them up. Instead of driving yourself mad by living in a house of boxes or leaving the garage so packed with stuff you have to park on the street, use a service like SpareFoot to find some temporary storage solutions. The service lets you compare prices for nearby storage, filtering by the size of the unit and attributes like climate control, 24-hour access, and security so you can find the perfect spot to stash your life for a while.
Cost: About $35-$100 per month on average.
