Moving an elderly family member across the nation to a new house or both parents into an assisted living facility can be difficult. Many situations call for senior parents to be relocated from their current residence, and their adult children will want to make sure the process goes well by taking care of their health, money, and logistics. Safebound Moving & Storage is here to provide some tips on making that process easier for everyone involved.
Choosing and Communicating
Seniors may have an emotional attachment to the house they’re leaving, so it’s normal for them to feel sad and uncertain about the transition. It might be difficult to discuss the move with your elderly parent, but doing so can help the transition go more smoothly. Give them time to adjust to the change and talk to them about where they will be living and why they are going. Give your loved one as much power as you can while they plan and carry out the relocation since the apparent loss of control is a common source of pain for seniors who are asked to leave their longstanding residences.
Enlist Family Members
It’s obvious that this will be a large task, so enlist your family’s assistance. Encourage siblings or other members of the immediate family to take some time off of work. Younger family members and even youngsters can take part. Having supportive and motivating family members close by might also lessen the emotional strain of relocation for your elderly parents.
Effective Planning
It will be helpful for families to have a mental image of what they are getting into before they start the sorting and arranging process. Which rooms require furnishing? How big is the new house in terms of square footage? Ann Goyer suggests drawing the floor layout of your loved one’s new residence on graph paper and cutting out furniture components in her article for AARP.
Sort and Unify
Downsizing will be necessary when moving your aging parents. With your support crew, go over the home item by item. To make the procedure simpler, you may group artifacts into categories such as those that need to be moved, left with family as heirlooms, sold or given, and those that need to be thrown away. Don’t let yourself become an emotionless packing robot. As you assist your elderly parent in organizing their stuff, respect the sentimental value attached to personal items and permit them to reflect on the past. Keep in mind that you are relocating memories, not simply objects. Be receptive to your personal feelings as well, particularly if this was your childhood home.
Wash and Fix
After the packing and sorting are finished, work still has to be done. The main criteria are the same whether the home will be sold, rented, or given to another relative. They should consider cleaning the house and making any necessary repairs before they worsen. It’s preferable to address maintenance concerns now rather than later when the property is up for sale (or after renters move in).
Prepare for moving day
Your elderly loved one can move into their new home using a variety of methods. The simplest but most expensive option is a full-service mover. They will load everything, transport it to its location, and then set everything up. We compared moving prices and discovered it would cost more than $6,000 to transport a two-bedroom house’s belongings across the nation. Using a self-service mover, in which their family loads the moving truck but a professional mover transports the goods, can help families move for less money.
The other choice is to rent a moving truck or trailer from a commercial moving company as a do-it-yourself (DIY) project. However, even the do-it-yourself option of hiring a U-Haul or Ryder is not inexpensive; when petrol is taken into account, a move from Atlanta to Los Angeles in a 26-foot truck might cost more than $3,000 in total.
The most priceless cargo of all isn’t even mentioned in this expense discussion—your loved ones. The majority of seniors have outgrown their days of road trips and probably wouldn’t be very excited about a 32-hour trek. Therefore, even if you want to transport everything yourself, think about making travel arrangements for your elderly loved one by air.
We’re hesitant to offer general advice because each family’s circumstances are different, but we do hope that these suggestions will help you plan and carry out your elderly loved one’s next steps more effectively.
