Month: April 2018

Sprint or Marathon: your move pace is up to you

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time-731110_1280When you’re getting ready to make a transition, you might wonder how long before your move should you start working with a move manager? That depends: are you a sprinter or a marathoner?

You’ve already done the hard work leading up to your move. Think about it as having done the training runners do leading up to an event. You did the thinking and considering and reviewing to that brought you to the place to where you are ready to make a transition. And you’ve decided where you are going to go, an equally tough thing to do. So now the training phase is over and you are at the starting line, ready for the actual event to get underway.

The Marathoner’s Move

If you’re a marathoner, you will start working a move manager three to six months ahead of the date you are planning to list your house for sale because you prefer a measured, consistent pace over a longer period of time to sort, plan your new space and stage your house for sale. With our marathon-type move clients, we schedule of work sessions once or twice a week, always moving forward. And yes, there is homework assigned for between sessions.

Marathon runners will tell you they have to dig a little deeper, find a little more oompf in the final miles of the race. Similar to that, even if you’ve done most of the prep work, the final stretch before your move takes some extra effort. The measured pace gets kicked up a notch when we start packing what’s going with you and clearing out things that are not going but were needed for home staging. But for the most part, you did the training, you put in the time sorting and planning and you’ll get through the move and the unpacking that follows in your new place just fine.

Speaking of unpacking, marathon-type clients often prefer to unpack in stages. The essentials get unpacked the first day. The furniture gets arranged, beds get made, the coffee pot is ready for operation, the clothing is taken out of the wardrobes so those big boxes get out of there and whatever else can be unpacked and placed easily is done. Non-essentials like books and art are stowed and unpacked over the next week so you can settle in at a measured pace at your new home too.

The Sprinter’s Move

If you’re a sprinter, you may start working with a move manager closer to when you plan to list your house for sale or even after you’ve sold your house and you’re ready to move. You are ready to go and eager to get things done fast. We might work with you daily, or every other day right through the move and unpacking to help you hit all your goals.

Sprinters know there isn’t a lot of extra time to make changes. Logistics that count on outside organizations, like non-profits and movers, might take a little extra work to get in place so they are ready to take the baton from you in the moving relay race. Sometimes Plan A, getting donations picked up, for example, turns into Plan B, delivering donations, instead. But fixing challenges like that why you work with a move manager in the first place! If there’s one thing we move managers have, it’s a deep bag of tricks for getting things done.

When it comes to unpacking day, sprinters like to get it done fast. To get there, we bring a SWAT team of unpackers to get boxes emptied and out, to get as much as possible put away and to stow things that will be put away later where they won’t be in the way.

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There’s no right or wrong pace for your move. It’s your move and you should do it at the pace that suits you best. As move managers, we use our skills to make sure you can work at your most comfortable speed and have a great transition. We’re your team, there to make sure that you cross that finish line when you expect to in a way that works for you. And we are definitely going to cheer you along every step of the way.

 

 

Grab bars for one and all!

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Sometime after we humans decided that shower grab bars were a good thing, we also decided that they were only needed by older people. This would make perfect sense if only people over the age of 65 had the ability to slip on a wet soapy bathtub. But as anyone who has ever shaved their legs in the shower or who has jumped into the tub  without making sure the suction cup tub mat was stuck to the porcelain can tell you, it is entirely possible to have a Wile E. Coyote arm waving moment of slippage at any age. So why we don’t we put grab bars in all our bathtubs and shower stalls?

The grab bar debate is reminiscent of the seat belt debate. Remember when we didn’t wear seat belts because we didn’t want to wrinkle our clothing? According to The Hotly Contested History of Seat Belts, until the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) was established in 1966, not only did most cars not have seat belts, they also didn’t have shatterproof windshields, headrests to prevent whiplash and energy absorbing steering wheels. Now 85% of us wear seatbelts and we can have cars with airbags, backup cameras and lane drift warning devices. Somewhere along the way we decided that not getting launched through the windshield was a better idea than worrying about whether our gabardine got rumpled. So why don’t we feel that way about shower grab bars?

It’s not like bathroom injuries are rare. The CDC gathered info from hospitals on patients that were treated for non-fatal bathroom injuries and crunched the data to find out how often, where and how people were accidentally injuring themselves.

Here’s what they found in their 2011 report:

“In 2008, an estimated 234,094 nonfatal bathroom injuries among persons aged ≥15 years were treated in U.S. EDs, for an injury rate of 96.4 per 100,000 population. The rate for women was 121.2 per 100,000 and was 72% higher than the rate for men (70.4 per 100,000). Although approximately the same number of cases occurred in each 10-year age group, injury rates increased with age. Falls were the most common primary cause of injury (81.1%), and the most frequent diagnosis was contusions or abrasions (29.3%). The head or neck was the most common primary part of the body injured (31.2%). Most patients (84.9%) were treated and released from the ED; 13.7% were treated in the ED and subsequently hospitalized.”

And their recommendation?

“Persons in all age categories sustained bathroom injuries, especially when bathing or showering or when getting out of the tub or shower. Raising awareness about potentially hazardous activities and making a number of simple environmental changes, such as installing grab bars inside and outside the tub or shower and next to toilets, could benefit all household residents by decreasing the risk for injury.”

Installing a grab bar isn’t all that complicated, it’s a “simple environmental change.” But convincing yourself to add one even though you aren’t an older person can take a little bit of inner dialogue. But seriously; which is more embarrassing—having a grab bar in your shower or explaining the big contusion on your face to everyone because you didn’t have one?

If you decide to add a grab bar, make the full commitment and install one screwed into wall. There are bars that work with heavy duty suction cups, but we all know suction cups are finicky and unreliable. Go ahead and do the job right. For you DIYers, The Family Handyman has info to get you started.

Oh, and while you’re installing that grab bar, go ahead and install a handrail on both sides of your cellar stairs…but that’s a topic for another time.

(You can read the whole CDC report here, charts and all.)

 

 

 

Rethinking room use in new spaces

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Over the past century plus, the traditional American home floor plan with its dedicated rooms for specific purposes has reigned supreme. But in the past decade or so, it’s faced stiff competition in the home design popularity contest from open concept floor plans. Both have their virtues.

Traditional layouts started with the classic foursquare floor plan, four rooms laid out in a square on one floor, possibly with another room or two on a second floor. In older homes, there were doors on some of the rooms, giving homeowners the opportunity to use heat more efficiently by not heating non-essential rooms. In time, the footprint for traditional homes expanded, but the concept remained the same. Separate rooms for separate functions.

A downside to traditional layouts is that some rooms wind up underutilized. The dining room in particular might not see much use (or it might be co-opted for another purpose like spare craft room or laundry folding room).

On the other side of the space delineation equation, open floor plans have wide open spaces usually called great rooms—part kitchen, part dining room, part family room. Great rooms are gathering spots. They’re rooms that are always in use; rooms that become the center of the home.

Moving to a more compact living space can be daunting if you’ve lived all your life with a traditional floor plan. You’re used to watching TV in the family room and eating in the kitchen or dining room and using your computer in the study. It might feel like you are losing a lot of space by giving up your individual rooms.

But stop for a minute think about it: how many of the rooms in your house do you actively live in and use?  Half the rooms? All of the rooms? The extra space is nice to have when you need it, but how often do you actually need it?

If the answer is you have a few rooms you use a lot and a lot of rooms you rarely use, it might not be as hard as you think to adapt to a smaller space in your new apartment. You might be able to reconfigure and do as much in a smaller footprint. Try rethinking your floor plan. Instead of thinking of your new space from the perspective of  your traditional home, try thinking of your new space as an open concept great room. You’ve always had a dedicated space for entertaining, TV watching and using your computer—but couldn’t all those things also happen in the main living area?

It might be that making that kind of shift also means thinking of your furniture differently as well. Many people feel the need to bring a large couch with them because they’ve always had one. But in a new great room space where the dining table and chairs are there to provide additional seating when needed, a love seat or a pair of nice comfortable armchairs are more functional and versatile choices.

Sometimes it takes new furniture to make the new space work. You may not need end tables if you can find decorative two drawer file cabinets to store all your documents (if you have that many documents!). A big TV stand might be replaced by something with more function if you mount your TV on the wall. A little creative thinking can go a long way towards making your smaller new nest even more functional than your current space.

It’s easy to expand into larger spaces, but challenging to shift into smaller spaces. Rethinking your rooms might make you realize that you don’t actually need as much space as you imagine you do. You may realize that for your new apartment, less really can be more.

For more open floor plan inspiration, check out these floor plan ideas for smaller spaces from MyDomaine and this Design*Sponge article,