We moved when my youngest was eighteen months and my eldest had just started school. I thought I’d planned it well. Spreadsheet, colour-coded boxes, a very optimistic sense of how helpful small children would be while everything they owned disappeared into cardboard.
The spreadsheet did not survive contact with reality.
Moving is stressful at the best of times. Moving with children adds a layer of chaos that nobody really prepares you for — not the removal company, not your conveyancer, definitely not those chirpy listicles you read at midnight when you’re lying awake wondering if you’ve told the dentist your new address. (You haven’t. None of us ever remember the dentist.)
So this is the honest version. What I’d do differently, what actually helped, and the bits that are just hard no matter what you do.
Timing: The Thing Everyone Gets Wrong
There’s a reason half the country moves in late August. HMRC — the government body that records every property sale in the UK — confirms that transactions are highly seasonal, with summer consistently the busiest period for completions.” It’s always schools. Everyone trying to get settled before September, which means removalists are booked solid, prices go up, and you’re fighting the entire country for the same completion dates.
If you have any flexibility at all, don’t move in August. January and February are the quietest months — more availability, better prices, solicitors who aren’t completely underwater. Yes, it’s cold. Unpacking in February is grim. But moving in August with young children when every other family in the country is also moving in August is a specific kind of stress I wouldn’t wish on my worst enemy.
If August is the only option — and for a lot of families it genuinely is — book everything stupid early. Removalist, end-of-tenancy cleaner, childcare for moving day. All of it. Months ahead if you can.
Get the Kids Out of the House on Moving Day
I cannot stress this enough. Moving day is not a day for children to be present if there is any humanly possible way to avoid it.
With a toddler and a four-year-old, our moving day involved one of them sitting inside a box that someone was trying to carry, the other one crying because she couldn’t find a specific plastic dinosaur that turned out to be in a bag in the car the whole time, and both of them needing lunch at the exact moment the removal team were trying to get a corner sofa around a staircase that was clearly never designed for corner sofas.
Small children don’t understand why everything is going away. They don’t understand why they can’t have the snack that’s now in a box on a van. They are, reasonably, unsettled and clingy and sometimes just furious about the whole situation.
Grandparents, a childminder, a really good friend who owes you one — whoever you can get. Take them up on it. It makes the move faster, calmer, and significantly less likely to end in everyone crying in the kitchen at 6pm.
On Removalists: Actually Compare Them
First time we moved, went with a recommendation, didn’t shop around. Paid over the odds and the communication was patchy at best. Second time I spent twenty minutes on Find a Mover searching moving companies getting quotes from several different companies and it made a real difference — both in price and in finding someone who was actually good at keeping you updated on the day. It was also a great way to teaching your kids the value of saving in a real life scenario – added bonus.
With kids, the thing to ask beyond price is what happens if completion is delayed. It happens more than people expect — a slow solicitor, a seller who hasn’t quite vacated, keys that show up two hours late. A decent removalist will absorb this without making it your problem. Some won’t. Worth asking before you commit.
Also ask about furniture reassembly. Getting the kids’ beds up and usable on night one is everything. The first night in a new house is already hard for small children without them sleeping on a mattress on the floor because nobody had the energy to figure out where the allen key went.
The Car Is Its Own Situation
If you’re moving any real distance, think properly about the car. Loading children into it on top of everything else moving day involves, then driving for three or four hours while managing the emotional fallout of the move in real time, is a lot.
A service like VehicleMove can transport the car separately so you and the kids can travel however works best for you — train, different car, whatever. It sounds like a luxury until you’re two hours into a motorway on moving day with everyone overdue for a nap and you realise the snacks are in the car boot underneath three bags you can’t access. For local moves it’s overkill. For anything longer, genuinely worth looking at.
Set Up Their Rooms First. Seriously, First.
Best advice I was given before we moved and I’m passing it straight on: the moment the van arrives, get the kids’ bedroom stuff off first. Not the kitchen. Not the living room. Theirs.
Then while the rest of the unloading happens, one of you sets up their rooms. Bed made. Familiar things visible. Favourite toy somewhere obvious. It doesn’t need to be perfect — it just needs to feel like theirs.
A new house is genuinely disorienting for small people. Different smells, different sounds at night, different shadows. Their room feeling recognisably safe makes the first few nights so much better. Everything else can stay in boxes for a week. Their space cannot.
The Admin Pile
Sorting everything after a move takes longer than you’d think, and with children there’s more of it. School admin. GP registration. Dentist. Health visitor if you’ve got little ones. Council tax. Electoral roll. Subscriptions. The post that gets redirected but somehow still doesn’t arrive for three months.
If your move is complicated — staggered completion dates, things going into storage, moving in stages — a friend in New Zealand mentioned there are platforms that do everything, a one stop shop like Movingle car transport and house movers is useful for keeping track of the logistics across different parts of the move. With kids, staged moves happen more often than people plan for, because rarely does everything align neatly on one day.
Make the admin list before you move. Work through it in the first two weeks. Boring but important — finding out your child’s medical records are still at the old address six months later is the kind of thing that really doesn’t need to happen.
The First Few Weeks Are Hard and Then They’re Not
I want to be honest about this because I don’t think the cheerful moving-with-kids content really is: it’s harder than you think it’ll be. Not the move itself necessarily — but the two to four weeks after. Kids who are clingier than usual. Bedtimes that take forty minutes longer. Meltdowns that seem out of proportion until you remember they’ve just had their entire world rearranged.
It passes. Kids are more adaptable than we give them credit for. The things that help most are pretty small — same bedtime routine in the new house, finding the nearest playground and going twice in the first week, letting them have some say in how their room is arranged. Consistency inside the chaos.
It’s a chapter, not a permanent state. Even when it really doesn’t feel like it at 7pm on day three when nobody will sleep.
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