How to plan a move without missing anything
Moving is not one task; it is dozens of small ones that all depend on a single date. Miss the window to schedule your electricity and you arrive to a dark house. Guess the number of boxes and you are taping together grocery cartons at midnight. Leave the calendar in your head and something important slips. The three tools on this site break the move into the parts that actually cause trouble, and turn your move date into concrete, dated actions. This guide explains how the pieces fit together and how to use each one well.
The three jobs a move really breaks into
Almost everything in a household move falls into one of three buckets. First, the utilities: turning services off at the old place and on at the new one, in the right order and on the right days, so you are never paying for an empty home or arriving to one with no power. Second, the physical haul: how much you own, how many boxes and what supplies it takes to pack it, and how big a truck it takes to move it. Third, the sequence: the long tail of bookings, transfers, and errands that have to happen in a sensible order over the weeks before the date. This site has one tool for each: the utility transfer planner, the whole-move estimator, and the moving timeline generator.
Utilities: the part with real deadlines
Utilities are the part of a move most likely to go wrong, because they run on the providers' schedules, not yours. A good rule is to handle them about three weeks out. Schedule your old home's electricity, gas, and water to stop the day after you move out, so you have power while you clean and load, and set the new home's service to start the day before you arrive, so the lights and heat are on when you walk in. Internet is the exception that needs the most lead time, because a technician visit can be booked out two or three weeks, so reserve it first. The utility transfer planner takes your move date and produces the exact call-by dates for every one of these, in order, so nothing is left to memory.
Why the state you move to changes the plan
In most of the United States, one regulated utility both delivers and sells your electricity or gas, so starting service is a single phone call. But a number of states have deregulated, or opened to retail choice, which means the utility still owns the wires or pipes and delivers the energy, while you pick a separate company that supplies it. In those states, turning on service is two steps: choose a supplier, then start delivery. In some of them you cannot get service connected at all until you have chosen a supplier. Texas works this way for electricity, and Georgia works this way for residential natural gas. If you are moving into one of these markets and do not know it, you can lose days waiting to get power scheduled.
The utility transfer planner reads a dated, 50-state module that records which states have residential electricity choice, which have natural gas choice, and which run only limited or capped programs. When your destination is a deregulated market, the planner adds a "choose a supplier" task with the extra lead time it needs, and when your origin is one, it reminds you to check your existing supply contract for an early-termination fee before you cancel. Because retail-choice rules change with legislation and regulatory orders, the module carries the date it was last reviewed, and every plan tells you to confirm the current rules with your destination state's Public Utility Commission before you sign anything.
Estimating the haul before you buy a single box
The two questions that decide the cost and stress of the physical move are how many boxes you need and how big a truck to rent. Both come down to how many rooms you have, how full they are, and how many people live there. The whole-move estimator asks for exactly that and returns, in one pass, a box count broken down by type, a recommended rental-truck size, and a rough budget for boxes, tape, and paper. The box counts lean slightly high on purpose, because running out of boxes at ten at night is far more costly than having a few spare. Order supplies about six weeks out, once you have the estimate, so you can start packing rarely used rooms early.
A common mistake is renting the truck by bedroom count alone. Two homes with the same number of bedrooms can differ enormously once you add a full garage, a basement, or years of accumulation, so the estimator works from a volume figure that includes a furniture allowance and adjusts for how packed the rooms are. If the recommendation sits near the top of a truck size, size up: a truck that is slightly too big costs a little more, while one that is too small means a second trip or leaving things behind.
Working backward from the date
The reason moves feel chaotic is that the tasks are usually written as a forward list, when they are really a backward schedule. Booking a mover four weeks out only works if you gathered quotes six weeks out, which only works if you inventoried your home eight weeks out. The moving timeline generator turns your move date into that backward schedule automatically, placing each milestone, from starting a moving binder through updating your license after you arrive, on the day you should act. It hands the utility work off to the transfer planner at the three-week mark and the packing work off to the estimator at six weeks, so the three tools form one coherent plan rather than three separate to-do lists.
Both date-driven tools export an .ics calendar file, so you can import the whole plan into Google Calendar, Apple Calendar, or Outlook and get an all-day reminder on each date, and both pages print cleanly if you prefer a checklist on the fridge. Everything runs in your browser, with no account and no address required: you choose your states and your date, and the plan is built on your device.