Saying goodbye is never an easy thing to do, and if you happen to find yourself caught up in the process of moving to a new home, probably one of the first thoughts to cross your mind will be how to say goodbye to your friends and family.
Amidst typical worrisome questions that moving to another part of the country raises…
… leaving behind the people you love and care about the most can turn out to be a truly heartbreaking experience.
And to add insult to injury, there’s another difficult farewell that awaits your immediate attention – saying goodbye to your soon-to-be old home.
If you’ve lived in the home you’re about to leave for many years, then you must have filled it up with happy memories and charged it with positive energy from wall to wall and floor to ceiling.
In this case, you’re surely headed for a rather emotional farewell to the most treasured non-living member of your family – the home.
To help you emerge from this difficult transitional period with renewed hope, we have prepared for you these 8 ways to say goodbye to your home when moving.
So, how do you say goodbye to your home?
1. Document Your Good Memories
The photo album of your old home will give you plenty of reasons to smile after the move.
Saying goodbye to a house can be tough for various reasons, and one of them is the realization that the special moments you had in it can never be re-lived anymore.
You’re not only leaving an inanimate structure where you have found shelter from the dangers of the world outside or rest after a long and exhausting day at work.
In reality, you’re also moving away from all the great fun, invigorating laughter, and quality time spent with the beloved members of your family. And in doing so, the fear of forgetting these precious moments grows stronger and stronger inside you.
Human memory can be hugely selective and painfully fallible, so take out your dedicated camera or smartphone and start taking tons of pictures of your home as if your life depended on it.
Digital cameras have practically eliminated the fear of running out of film, so take advantage of that technological leap and go on a photographic tour around your house before you start packing for your relocation and take one last memorable look at its interior and exterior through the viewfinder.
Snap random spontaneous photos of your home exactly as it looks on a normal day and don’t worry about beautifying it for the occasion. After all, you want to document and later remember your residence au naturel.
After moving to your new home, transfer and keep all the photographs in a special folder on your computer, or print out the best ones and arrange them inside a photo album entitled Home Sweet Home.
This realistic visual record of your old house can get you through the painful post-relocation period when you might be dealing with a wide range of strong emotions, including the occasional pangs of homesickness or even bouts of relocation depression.
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Chances are that each and every part of your home tells an interesting story.
Having plenty of photos of your soon-to-be-old residence is a good way to part with your home, but sometimes that alone is not enough to provide the genuine goodbye you’re looking for and hoping to find.
Not to worry though, for you can easily take the parting process to the next level – gather up your family, go through each room of the house, and let everyone bid their own special farewell by telling an interesting story that happened there and reminiscing about a happy and fun memory related to that particular room.
With the help of your loyal still or video camera, create a living scrapbook of memories to keep the past alive.
After each family member has taken their proper goodbyes, leave the room together as a unit and close the door behind you as a symbolic gesture of moving on.
Go to the next room and do it all over again.
If you’re moving with children who are old enough to understand what is really happening, encourage them to draw or put down in writing their favorite recollections connected to the family house.
The provoked expression of their feelings and emotions will have a dual purpose: it will not only enable them to prepare mentally and accept the upcoming change, but it can also serve as an indicator of your kids’ level of happiness and satisfaction during your time together in that very home.
Don’t forget to invite your children’s best friends and your favorite neighbors to the house-leaving party as well.
You may not feel like partying only days before the most stressful day of your entire move, but a small and modest gathering of close friends will go a long way towards easing the relocation tension and having another good opportunity to say goodbye to your old house.
Having an unplanned relaxation time amid scattered piles of moving boxes is perfectly acceptable and you don’t have to worry about cleaning your place after the party either (leave the mighty sweep for moving day after your movers leave the premises).
Paper plates, plastic cups, and utensils are perfectly fine as well considering the highly transitional period you find yourself at the moment.
Play some good music in the background, provide a variety of refreshing drinks and snacks, and leave any immediate issues and serious conversations for later.
Once the fun has started, ask your friends to share their fondest memories of your home and offer a prize for whoever comes up with the most hilarious recollection of the family house.
The idea behind it all is to attempt to commemorate the great times you had in your home for one last final time and to get the easing sense of optimistic departure that you long for.
You will never forget the lovely tree by your childhood home under whose leaves you and your spouse kissed for the first time.
One somewhat unusual and yet proven way to say goodbye to a house is to take a meaningful piece of it with you to your new home.
This isn’t about the typical items found in a household and the inhabitants’ personal possessions, both of which will be transported to their final destination anyway.
This is about “stealing” a precious souvenir from your old home, something that is out of the spiritual realm and has actual physical properties such as mass, dimensions, density, color, hardness, volume, and so on.
And most importantly, the object that you will borrow permanently should be charged with a concentrated value of meaningfulness for you.
Remove the door handle or doorknob of your favorite room in the house;
Take down the door frame where your child’s height marks are still visible;
Uproot special transplantable plants, shrubs, or young trees to re-plant in the garden of your new home;
Press the leaves of your most loved trees in the photo album Home Sweet Home or between the pages of a book;
Place a handful of soil from your lovely garden in a glass jar;
Go a step further and record the magnificent birdsong in your backyard or the sound of rain on your front porch.
Whenever necessary, replace the mementos you take from your home with new meaningless substitutes so that no property damage results from your actions.
5. Leave A Secret Message
Bury a small treasure in your backyard but don’t place an X mark over the exact spot as an extra challenge for future treasure hunters.
Have you ever found a hidden object or coded message in a basement, attic, or cache under a creaking kitchen floorboard?
And if you have, then you surely know how earth-shattering the experience can be.
Another effective way of saying goodbye to a home is to leave a secret message or hide an artifact in a clever way as a distinctive and exhilarating method of proving your own existence in the residence.
The possibilities of leaving your mark on the property are endless:
Bury a small treasure chest or time capsule in your backyard – a children’s toy, a letter, a poem, a list of essential moving tips, an invaluable moving checklist, pieces of clothing, photos of your family and the house, an interesting souvenir, etc.
Write a coded message on a wall somewhere and place a layer of paint over it to mask it;
Leave your handprints or footprints in a patch of cement somewhere around the property;
Carve your initials on a tree nearby or think of another exciting and secretive way to shout out We were here! without causing any damage to the building itself or the adjacent land.
6. Welcome The New Owners
The best welcoming gift you can give to the new homeowners is to plant a beautiful tree near the house – a highly meaningful living thing that will grow and mature as the years go by.
One of the most satisfying ways to say goodbye to a home is to leave a heartfelt gift for the new owners. As long as you mean it, the well-wishing token doesn’t have to be something expensive at all.
You can write them a welcoming note or a longer letter of practical advice, you can buy them a welcome mat or a beautiful vase, or you can leave a selection of the best photographs you took for the photo album explained in detail above.
Also, a thoughtful present for the new homeowners can be a brand new photo album with only one photograph depicting the house exterior, hinting that they should fill in the rest of it with happy memories of their own.
It’s a good idea to stay away from clichés like bottles of wine, toasters, or the like – instead, rack your brain and think of an elegant and memorable welcoming gift.
Keep in mind that being on friendly terms with the new homeowners will give you the opportunity to come back and re-visit your old home if your nostalgia becomes too strong to handle after the relocation.
7. Break Your Bad Memories
Sometimes all you need to do to move forward is break your bad memories and bad luck.
We all know, whether from personal experience or through hearsay, that not all memories related to a home are happy ones, just as not all experiences are positive ones.
Change is inevitable, and sometimes change is good.
In this line of thought, an overall miserable existence in a certain house or apartment due to a score of interconnected unfavorable factors can be a reason enough for its inhabitants to decide to move to another house, in another city, in another state.
Yes, at times, all a person needs to break the bad spell is to leave the past behind… and never look back.
If your own home is full of negative energy and you can’t recall the last time you felt happy inside it, maybe it’s the right time for you to move. In this case, you will need a proper way to say goodbye to your sad old house.
Just before you move away, take a porcelain vase or a clay jar, and simply break it into pieces!
How you go about breaking that fragile object is irrelevant – what matters is the symbolic significance of the act of smashing what it holds. You break the bad luck, negative energy, and bad memories hovering in the property, and move on with your life never to return.
8. Focus On Your New Home
Wave goodbye to your old place one final time and focus on your new home.
More often than not, the best way to say goodbye to a home and say hello to a new one is to focus on the new life ahead of you.
Think of all the exciting adventures to enjoy and interesting people to meet in the new city, and think of all the clear benefits you and your family will get from the cross-country move.
Turn your utmost attention to all the post-relocation tasks you will need to take care of the minute you move into your new home – refer to our detailed visual checklist 21 Essential Things to Do After Moving Into a New House.
Yes, it’s important to keep your focus fixed on your future but you shouldn’t forget your old friends or the place where you came from either.
Always remember that forward is the only way forward.
hi- I left secret notes in a few places of the house, detailing our family and the years we lived there. I also left a card and a plant for the new family, sending well wishes for them and the house we loved so much. Thanks for all the great tips! We video taped a walk through and my husband climbed up in the tree he planted 20 years ago. It was hard to say goodbye, but we felt we did it right!
Before I moved out of my first apartment, some of my neighbors, the ones I’ve grown close with, and some close friends threw me a some sort of farewell party. They also, jokingly, said that that party was for moving to the next stage in life. Now, my current neighbors and friends are planning to throw us a farewell party as well as a baby shower. We’re moving again, despite the pandemic, because I’ve gotten surprisingly pregnant just a few months of being married. As soon as the house, from Ballymore Homes, is built, we’ll start moving already.
Today is the last day we own the house I’ve lived in for about 11 years. We just have one last visit to pick up our few things that are left, and my 3 cats are there waiting for us. I’m moving an hour and a half away, more like two and a half when you factor in traffic. My house has sheltered me through some rough times, and I found my cats there as one week old kittens in a rusty bucket just outside our yard and I raised them as a foster mom. My bf lives close to here and now I won’t get to see him regularly. I never imagined it would be this difficult to leave the place I’m so used to and comfortable with. I don’t know how I’ll manage to adjust considering how sad I am about it. I’m already tearing up just thinking about it. I hate that I’m leaving. I hope my kitties learn to like their new home. I think I’ll carve my name in some inconspicuous spot in my closet. Time to get going….I can do this, I think. Wish me luck.
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Welcoming the new owners? Breaking something? I didn’t find these very helpful.
Going away parties aren’t too practical unless you do them early enough.
How about some ways to document and memorialize a home? The “have kids draw the room” suggestion is nice, but what if you don’t have little kids?
hi- I left secret notes in a few places of the house, detailing our family and the years we lived there. I also left a card and a plant for the new family, sending well wishes for them and the house we loved so much. Thanks for all the great tips! We video taped a walk through and my husband climbed up in the tree he planted 20 years ago. It was hard to say goodbye, but we felt we did it right!
I am in my new home but were are still moving things and it’s hard for me to leave it. I am crying right now.
Before I moved out of my first apartment, some of my neighbors, the ones I’ve grown close with, and some close friends threw me a some sort of farewell party. They also, jokingly, said that that party was for moving to the next stage in life. Now, my current neighbors and friends are planning to throw us a farewell party as well as a baby shower. We’re moving again, despite the pandemic, because I’ve gotten surprisingly pregnant just a few months of being married. As soon as the house, from Ballymore Homes, is built, we’ll start moving already.
Today is the last day we own the house I’ve lived in for about 11 years. We just have one last visit to pick up our few things that are left, and my 3 cats are there waiting for us. I’m moving an hour and a half away, more like two and a half when you factor in traffic. My house has sheltered me through some rough times, and I found my cats there as one week old kittens in a rusty bucket just outside our yard and I raised them as a foster mom. My bf lives close to here and now I won’t get to see him regularly. I never imagined it would be this difficult to leave the place I’m so used to and comfortable with. I don’t know how I’ll manage to adjust considering how sad I am about it. I’m already tearing up just thinking about it. I hate that I’m leaving. I hope my kitties learn to like their new home. I think I’ll carve my name in some inconspicuous spot in my closet. Time to get going….I can do this, I think. Wish me luck.
Thank you for putting this out there. I agree with your opinion and I hope more people would come to agree with this as well.