To believe that we can unpack from a move in under a week, and ask for your best tips to be able do so?

Of course you can. We’ve done it in 2-3 days two times but we stayed in the house we moved to. Why would you not stay there? much easier and far more motivating to get it done and yes we have children. Day 1 setting up their rooms was a priority.

It's always taken me months to unpack but when we did our last move DH went through every box in a couple of days I find this kind of speed baffling. That said we've been here 18 months and certain stuff he never uses is still arranged in a way I wouldn't have put it and I haven't got round to sorting it properly.

I think maybe like people are saying the key is to not have too much stuff to begin with. Definitely a weakness of mine

I think some people on here must be talking about moving smaller houses, a family member moved a few months ago and even with decluttering beforehand and paying for a packing a moving service the actual removal company did not manage to unload everything the first day!! It was left in a lorry overnight.
So no boxes weren't all unpacked same day because they weren't in the house to unpack!
Also when you move house surely the windows are never all exactly the same size so you can rarely just reuse all the same curtains, you often need to put up new curtain track or poles eg if the previous owners had poles but all your curtains are the style that need a track?
I can only assume people talking about unpacking it all in an afternoon are talking about moving from a smaller property and are aren't counting all the finishing touches.

I’ve been in my new house for about 6 weeks and am nowhere near unpacking everything, but I need to decorate and get new carpets everywhere.

Ah that makes sense.

I don’t think I could pack the house in a week as that’s where I would be doing all the sorting and arranging, and I wouldn’t like packers to do it at all for this reason.

Putting things in places is one of my favourite things to do though, so I love unpacking, deciding where something should do, deciding what to put with it, how to arrange a cupboard etc, so I can steam through unpacking in no time as I love doing it, and get antsy knowing there’s things in boxes that need a home!

Very doable, I have moved 10+ times from work. The bulk of unpacking can be done in a couple of days.

My priorities are kitchen first. Not only because you want to be able to prepare food, but it frees up a LOT of boxes. Bathroom next, to make sure you can shower. Then bedrooms, make beds. Living areas last.

You need to empty the boxes and rearrange the furniture? It’s not just going to fall into place!

@OptimisticReindeer do a couple of printed floor plans on which you've numbered and coloured the new rooms and if there's a garage include that too.
If you don't have time to go through what's in your loft now, which you should try to do, mark those boxes with the garage or other colour.

Put a sheet of appropriate coloured stickers in each room in your existing house. and ask the movers to put a couple of stickers on each side of box as it's packed. On moving day pin up the floor plan and refer everyone to it.

This means you won't be faced with a constant barrage of 'where do you want this'

• obviously put a note for 'do not sticker' on anything polished or items that might be damaged by this process

I’ve always unpacked most things in a day. Never a week!

How the fuck are you all managing this?
I moved a month ago. I’m still kicking boxes around, furniture is in the wrong place and nothing really fits or works.

It took us months to unpack too, but we had a lot of cleaning to do upon arrival (a whole day as there was a bit of mould and lots of grime), art frames that required hanging, a toddler who needed to be separated from our dog and managed, a dog to be walked, furniture to be reassembled (beds etc).

Also it depends on your packing strategy. I took a chunk off work ahead of the move to clean, sort, declutter and wrap/pack items, but ran out of time due to toddler needs. My DH took 1 day (!) and threw items randomly in supermarket & ikea bags with no labelling or sorting. Bleach in with toys and food, etc. Subsequently unpacking was a nightmare and the cause of lots of arguments (him blaming me for being too slow). Getting utilities set up took more time than expected too (we were in a dead zone for cell reception).

Easily, although you will probably have at least a couple of boxes which sit in the garage/shed for a few years after and never get opened…

When I last moved, the removals company unloaded by the lunchtime on Saturday. By the time my DC came back from their Dad’s on Sunday night everything was in the right place, including 2 beds I’d had to build for them from scratch, so a week is much more than enough time.

Those unpacked boxes in the roof..... Chuck them out. If you haven't needed them, or revisited them in years, they are not vital or sentimental.

As others we're always done by day two.

Easy, and we’ve always moved straight in too, slept on blow up beds the first day after a long distance move even. It’s tiring but the crucial thing is to label boxes and make sure the movers put them in the correct areas. I would start with the simplest, bathrooms, then kids rooms and then the kitchen, I had it all unpacked within 48 hours bar the boxes that then stayed for 12 years in the garage (not my stuff, ex’s)

Yes easily. Just take some time off work, get an excellent audiobook / podcast series, make sure you have plenty of energy (good food and sleep) and get in there and get it done.

We have unpacked a three bedroom family house in less than a week before. (The children were at school in the day.)

I found the packers were a bit random, or rather, they used a different methodology. They packed the books by size, whereas I shelve them by genre, then subdivide alphabetically by author, so I ended up with more than 30 boxes of books that were in no kind of actual order. I had to unpack them, pile them up by author, then shuffle the piles around to establish genre sections, and only then could I start the process of actually shelving. Plus, not having anyone to help by passing books to me meant that for the higher shelves (I very short), I had to spend ages clambering onto and off chairs whilst clutching a handful of books to put away. If I ever move house again I don’t know how I will manage as I am now too past it for all of the physicality of unpacking!

Sorry if repeating…
Declutter before you pack
Pack into boxes sorted and labelled with rooms in the new house that the stuff will go into and ask movers to take them to the rooms.
Deep clean new house before everything goes in if possible - as per your carpet cleaning. Much easier to wipe eg kitchen cupboards before you put stuff in them and it also means that other people can unpack the boxes straight onto the shelves. Probably less of an issue if you’re renting as it should all be clean anyway but I’ve bought houses that have been left in a horrible mess.
Get a Takker picture hanging tool from Amazon if ok to put pics up in rental property - costs under £20 and sticks tiny pins in plasterboard (there’s also a version for bricks) so you can put pictures up in minutes. This is the one thing that makes houses feel like a home to me!

Absolutely. We unpacked in two days. People seemed shocked but surely you just crack on?

I was about to say this. This is not how moves work, everyone moves the same day, your house would typically need packing up the day before as you won't get keys to the new house likely til lunchtime the day of the move and you will surrender your keys to the old house before getting the keys to the new.

OP it all depends if the new house needs any different furniture due to different layouts etc. Eg if old wardrobes or bookcases don't fit in new rooms due to size of radiators or perhaps a sloped ceiling, which then means you can't unpack some stuff until those new furniture items arrive.

Last move was a 4 bed to a 3 bed. I unpacked everything the same day and I had a LOT of boxes! Did it on my own, too.

DH has a thing about unpacking straight away, so we’ve always done it pronto. One tip: don’t procrastinate. Things like: which drawer to put things in, in the kitchen. Just put them somewhere. You can always swap things around later if you feel it’s not working how it is.

as long as you’ve enough storage in your new place, and not intending an immediate refurb or decorating, no problem.

Phew. Thought I was on my own!

What sorting needs to be done? I have a lot of books, I packed them away by shelf, and when the shelves were rebuilt in the new house I could just lift them out of the boxes shelf by shelf and just put them on the shelves in the order they had come off the old shelves. Maybe a couple of hours of a job?

But I do all my sorting as part of the packing process, so I spent the time rearranging them and sorting through them before they went into boxes as I had a lot of time to prep for the move, but wanted to be in and settled quite swiftly.

The movers will put everything in the right room, and put furniture where you want it which is 80% of the battle with unpacking.

We moved from a 4 bed to a 4 bed and we were 90% unpacked by the end of day 1

The main thing is to ruthlessly declutter before you move and then you're not unpacking junk that you don't need.