Moving? Make Sure You Make Your Big Purchases After You Move

I recently helped a friend move from an apartment to a house. In every group, there is always the “first” couple to make the leap from renting an apartment to owning a house. For our group of high school and college friends, this was the couple. I only mention this because helping someone move from an apartment to a house can be a much different experience then purely moving someone from one apartment to another.

The reason for this difference is because people who are moving into their first house tend to go a little bit crazy buying stuff in preparation for the new house. My male friend was pulling his hair out for a few weeks prior to the move because his wife was buying a variety of stuff for the new place. She even dropped money on a variety of baby clothes for a baby that wasn’t due for six months (she later said that it was done during a clearance sale and that in retrospect she wasn’t very proud of the purchase). What was so infuriating my male friend is that she was buying all of this stuff prior to the move which meant that all these new purchases had to be moved along with their already wide variety of belongings (they lived in a three bedroom apartment). It didn’t help that his parents also decided to buy them a new crib BEFORE their move.

There seems to be something that comes over people when they move into a larger dwelling. There is an automatic need to fill every single inch of the house even before it is even inhabited. I will freely admit that this seems to be a womanly impulse. Maybe it’s because women are much more interested in making their house a home then men are. Men are interested, but inherently they could live with a mattress on the floor and a mini-fridge and not bat a lash. Something seems to come over us when we find that we have extra room to fill. It’s happened to me before. But if you’re going to do it you should probably wait until you’ve moved before you purchase anything. That way you and your friends will be done moving in time for pizza at noon. That’s right, you have to provide pizza.