Home & Moving

Home Safety, Downsizing & Moving

Turning "the house does not feel safe any more" into a written list.

20 pages

Home Safety & Fall Audit

A room-by-room walkthrough that turns 'the house doesn't feel safe any more' into a written list.

$15

30 pages

Senior Move & Downsizing Organiser

Sorting a lifetime of belongings and comparing places to live, on paper, without losing track of anything.

$19

Free guides in this section

22 guides and checklists

A room-by-room walkthrough you can do in one afternoon

The house does not feel right any more, and you cannot say why in a sentence.

Moving day into assisted living: the two weeks before, the day itself, and the first night

A move into assisted living is three jobs pretending to be one: a paperwork job, a measuring job and a logistics job.

How to inventory the equipment and supplies in your parent's home

Three different people are going to ask what is already in the house: the person coming to assess it, the supplier arranging the next delivery, and the sibling who is about to buy a second one.

What to write down on a care facility visit

Every place looks fine for the first ten minutes, and by the third visit they have blurred into one another.

Closing up the house after your parent moves: mail, utilities, keys and the last walk-through

Once your parent has moved, the house becomes an administrative object: an address that still receives mail, accounts that still bill, and a building that needs heating and watching.

After a hip fracture: the records, the equipment and the house

This is a records page, not a medical page — ask the surgical team, the physical therapist and your parent's doctor about the recovery itself.

Arthritis and mobility: what to write down about the house and the week

This is a records page, not a medical page — ask your parent's doctor, pharmacist or therapist about the condition, the pain and the treatment.

Scanning 40 years of paper: mail-in, local shop, or do it yourself

There is a filing cabinet, a loft box and a drawer of envelopes, and somewhere inside is the document you need this week.

How to Sort and Downsize a Lifetime of Belongings

Four hours in the spare room and you have filled one carrier bag, because the third box contained school reports and everything stopped.

How to Keep a Record of What Was Sold, Kept or Given Away

Eighteen months after the house was cleared, someone will ask what happened to the dining table.

The downsizing sort checklist: five piles, one room at a time

Sorting a house is not one big decision.

How to Make a Home Inventory Before a Move

A home inventory sounds like an accountant's job until the van arrives and nobody can say whether the carriage clock went on it.

The home safety equipment list, room by room

Search this category and you get a hundred products in a grid with no sense of which ones need a professional and which ones need a screwdriver.

How to Do a Room-by-Room Home Safety Walkthrough

You have noticed the rug in the hall, and the bulb at the top of the stairs that has been out since June.

In-home or mobile: which medical alert fits your parent's week?

The choice between an in-home base station and a mobile unit is not a choice between cheap and expensive.

How to Organise a Parent's Move to Assisted Living

The decision was the hard part.

Questions to Ask a Nursing Home or Assisted Living Community

The tour is designed to be pleasant.

What to ask a facility about money, before you sign anything

Every facility will tell you a monthly figure on the tour.

The home visit: what to have ready, what to ask, what to do with the answers

An occupational therapist will spend an hour in your parent's house and see things you have stopped seeing after twenty years of visiting it.

What to Ask the Discharge Nurse Before Your Parent Goes Home

The discharge nurse is the person who knows what your parent's day has actually looked like on the ward, and what the house is going to have to absorb.

The questions to ask on a care home tour, and what to write down

A tour is designed to be reassuring.

The photo checklist to run before you move your parent

The hour you spend photographing a house before anything is packed is the cheapest hour of the whole move.