How I Get Organized in 2 Months the entire house

Last week I wrote about WHY I WAS OFF OF SOCIAL MEDIA FOR TWO MONTHS! If you haven't read it, you can read here in my blog! It was the last post before this one that I writing now.

But immediately after releasing my blog post  I had the feeling that I could have said so much more. I could have talked about the struggle to find a good and cheap moving company, I could have talked about how difficult it was to find a new home, the school selection process and other things. So I decided that this week I would go deeper into some of them and also talk about the process of getting the house organised after the move. 

Photo by Sarah Brown on Unsplash

But let’s start by the first thing you do when deciding to move, we need to find a house. This process is never easy, especially if you are abroad and are trying to get one via the internet and with Facetime calls. Yes we had a friend that works for REMAX, showing us houses via facetime and negotiating for us. One thing we noticed is that due to COVID confinement people started to move out of the city and look more for a house with a garden. This created an extra problem for us, since this made prices go higher and more people fighting for the same house. We tried to start with a smaller budget but soon realised that the only way was to get a more expensive one, less competition and still we lost 2 houses. People were willing to give ONE year upfront to guarantee the house. Surreal it’s the word that comes to my mind. But after 2 months looking we finally got one and we are very happy with it. 

In the meantime, we had to look for a school for our kids, and this was a totally different experience. We decided that it had to be a private bilingual school, we wanted our kids to keep learning multiple languages at the same time like they are used to it since they were born. Yes in Belgium they had Flemish at school, a bit of French and at Home Portuguese and English. So we made a list of potential schools and we contacted them. The first school that replied to us was full, so no vacancy for this year but the second one, Colegio Guadalupe, which by the way is 1.2km away from home scheduled an interview with ZOOM. 

We got our kids with us in front of the camera and prayed for them to behave during the next half hour. And I must say, they did a great job and they passed their first “JOB INTERVIEW”!

YOUR HIRED !!!! Yuppie 

I must say that this was a relief, for us this was the most important step of this entire operation. A good school was our top priority when we thought of moving to another country.

It was time now to find a moving company.

We wanted a good and professional company that would take care of the entire process. 

Again we went online and started looking for potential companies and started to ask prices.

What we learned from the beginning is that it is cheaper to sell your furniture and buy new one later. We had companies asking between 6k to 10k to take our stuff. This is way too much and we had to be creative and find a solution. So we decided to sell most of our furniture, Closets, Beds, chairs and one thing also was we had a deep clean in our wardrobes. The amount of clothes we had and that we were not using anymore was huge. We gave more than 15 big bags of clothes to an institution that helps the poor.This was also something that made me smile not just because I was reducing my moving cost but also and especially because we were helping the less fortunate.

Another thing that we used to reduce the cost of transportation was, we got all the clothes and small items into boxes, we piled all in EURO PALLETS and called a normal transportation company. We had 140 Boxes shipped by truck with a very small cost compared to what the moving company was asking.

Photo by Jason Leung on Unsplash

But let's talk about today's topic: How is it possible to organize the entire house in less than two months?

Imagine the scenario, you arrive at the new empty home and a few hours later you have 3 trucks full of furniture and 6 Euro Pallets with 140 boxes all in the driveway and you need to start organizing everything. Well the furniture was the easy part, They were responsible for putting everything into place and they did a great job and after 6h everything was into place and they were out of the house. The problem started after, time to start organising the 140 boxes and all that is inside into the correct places. Don’t forget one thing, we saw the house online and this is the first day I see the house in person, so I’m not familiar with all the closets and spaces that exist yet.

Now it’s time to start opening the boxes and putting everything into place. Despite that you are full of energy we can’t forget that you are already tired from the previous months of packing and cleaning the old house. So when you look at the boxes now, and even though I’m excited and pumped to get it done, I’m also physically exhausted. So I decided to go out for dinner with the family and get a good night's sleep. Tomorrow we start the battle.

New day, new life, new will, here we go. The first task was to get all the boxes into the right place. While packing I wrote on each box what was inside so like this we could easily identify them later.

Here we go for the 2 Months task:

1 - Kitchen: 

So we decided that we would start with the kitchen, don’t ask me why, I had to start somewhere. Time to go and get all the boxes with the word Kitchen. I gather them in the garden next by the kitchen door. So it is easy to still have space inside the kitchen and open all the boxes outside. 

I did a final look to the kitchen closets and in my head I designed and defined all the spaces. Time to start opening boxes.

So, I began to take out food (like pasta, rice, cookies, etc.) and define a place for food in the kitchen. After I took all the dishes, cups, cutlery and put everything straight! I did the same with the pans and other kitchen accessories. Took me one week to get the kitchen cleaned and organized.

This must seem too much and maybe some of you are thinking, ONE WEEK? Believe me, to take each item from the box and separate, clean and put it into place takes time.

2 - Bedrooms: 

Took everything out of the boxes and divided them into items (like jackets, shoes, dresses, trousers, etc.) organized by piles and defined for them the place in the closets. And after was just took them one by one and put them in the closets. Again this takes a huge amount of time. I can tell you the most difficult for me was my kids' bedrooms because of the number of toys my kids have. We did a deep cleaning of their toys before putting them into boxes, but even so, it seems that we need to do another deep cleaning! I honestly ran out of space for toys and had to go and buy more shelves. By the way, since Duarte loves surfing, I ordered 2 Shelves in the shape of surfboards and the result is amazing.

3 - Bathrooms: 

Here is the same process as before. Took first the essentials that we need daily. After a few days, I began to define places for the accessories, for stockaged (I like to have enough supplies, toilet paper, shampoos, shower gel , etc.)

But before all of this, and took a lot of time, the bathrooms were all clean, of course!

4 - Office: 

Here we needed to wait a bit, since we sold our desk while moving so we need to get the new one’s. So we defined every bit of space available and defined the spaces and ordered the furniture that took 5 days to arrive. While waiting I was getting all our books from the boxes and putting them on the only office item we kept from the previous house, our big white bookcase.

When our chairs and desks arrived it was time to install all, including our monitores, computers, power and networks. We are quite happy with the result.

I’m currently writing this blog post in our office.

5 - Living room: 

By nature this is a easy space, we just need to install the TV, get the sofas and carpet, put a big lamp and a smaller one. This is the spot I use to record this video. I love our living room and this sofa. True that a living room is more than these items. But these are the main ones.

6 - Dining room: 

This was a very easy one, everything came with the moving company and in 2h was ready.The only thing that I didn’t have was a sideboard that we ordered and was handmade by Paus&Pedras. This one I really love and I think they did a great job.

Now that everything is in place we start our new mission, is to find the right items to help decorate the space. But I like to look with time and don’t rush and buy the first thing that I see. So we are now looking for Lamps, mirrors, pillows and paintings.

Regarding pictures or paintings for the walls, 2 things I would like to point out are: Keep it simple and light, so get frames for your pictures and paintings that are monotone and clean with straight lines helping the pictures shine and not the frame. The second one is, first visualize the frames on the wall or if you prefer put them on top of the bed and try different designs. By trial and error we get to define the best display and we don’t regret it after it's all installed . 

I'm still enjoying this process, but at the same time, it's so exhausting. But in the end, I will feel great!

Lots of love