As you’ve probably already figured out, we’ve bought a house. It is going to be a big change, but it is made easier by the fact that the location, while deep in the suburbs, will still allow me to walk to shops. Also a mega-mall is about a 15 minute bus ride away. So, we may be banishing ourselves to the suburbs, but I still don’t need to learn to drive. Best of all, the little man’s new school is just down the block. Yay! Second best of all, there will be a place for me to set up a sewing/craft area. And I don’t mean the dining room table. 😉

Our moving day is now about two months away (our closing date is flexible, and it is a long story), and we’ve started packing and getting organized. We’ve also been thinking quite a lot about how we want to decorate our new home, and about all the new furniture we need to buy. The internet and cloud-based apps are helping us share information very easily.

• We are using Pinterest to pin ideas about lighting fixtures, furniture, and other odds and ends. This way we can quickly share pictures of styles, furniture or new gadgets for our home. Having everything laid out visually like this helps us to picture how things might go together (or not), and it is super easy to pin images from just about any website.

• We are using Google Docs to keep a running budget of must-do-asap improvements,  legal costs, and other expenses. Since the document is shared between myself and my husband, whenever one of us gets a price quote, we can quickly update the spreadsheet and have an up-to-date budget available to faint and fret over.

• We using Microsoft OneNote (both on our PCs and our phones) so share more notes, To Do lists and shopping lists. Again, the real-time updating lets us mark things off, or add things, as needed and keeps up both on the same page. I also have a page in our OneNote notebook for a list of places we need to change our address. As a piece on mail comes in, I add it to the list. We will be doing mail forwarding through the post office just to make sure nothing is forgotten.

We are also using CorelDraw to create a floorplan of our new house, to scale, and adding our current furniture to it. This has allowed us to figure out if our computer desks will fit in the den, the best way to set up the craft/guest room, and how we might want to finish the basement. It is a really great tool, and makes moving day a snap. We did the same thing the last time we moved, and it allowed us to put all the furniture exactly where we wanted it right away. CoreDraw isn’t online, and it isn’t free, but there are similar options available.

My husband and I are both very organized people who love lists and research, and all these tools are perfect for helping up meet our goals and make our move fairly smooth. Now, if only we could get an app that packs our boxes for us we’d be all set!