You might be thinking: Who the heck plans to move six months out?!

There are a few key reasons that I see people plan a move for this long: First, many families who need to relocate for jobs or any other reason often wait for a school year to end before making the full move. Parents want their kids to be able to finish out their current year, but know that the move is imminent. Second, I see more and more people moving to dream locations just because they can! Working from home has allowed so many the opportunity to move to more affordable places, more desirable locations or into their dream homes. In these instances, they are planning out every part according to their own needs. So if a move six or seven months out is easier to plan and execute, then that’s exactly what they’re doing.

My husband and I fall into the second category. We are ready to move to our dream location, but we don’t want to rush it. We’re taking our time to research the area, find the right house and give ourselves enough time to properly plan for the move.

According to our ideal timeline, we’re currently about six months away from moving day. So there are two key tasks that I have on my schedule this month:

• The Kitchen: With just 26 weeks here at our current house, I’m starting to look at the foods we have in our freezer and in our pantry. We like to pre-cook large meals and freeze leftovers for easy week-night cooking all the time, but now it’s time to figure out how to empty out the fridge before the move. The pantry is the same way. 3 bags of 00 pizza dough flour sitting in our pantry right now means that we should probably make pizza a few times before we move. Ideally, I’ll figure out how to plan meals so that our freezer and our pantry are as empty as possible on moving day.

• Paperwork: I am notorious for keeping paperwork that has any semblance of importance in our filing cabinet. I am also notorious for letting that paperwork accumulate year over year with no process in place to purge it on a regular basis. So now, I’m looking at several years of paperwork to go through and decide what is important to keep and what to recycle.

These tasks can of course be tackled later in the planning process, but I like to give myself as much time as possible. It makes me feel that the tasks aren’t quite so daunting. If we have 5 drawers in the filing cabinet and I dedicate enough time to get through one drawer per month, that feels much more manageable than going through the entire cabinet in a weekend.

As we move on to future months, more projects like this will be added to the list. Getting started with these two areas this early also helps to remind me that it can all be done! After a couple weeks of going through a few folders of paperwork at a time and eating one of our frozen meals each week, I’m reminded that slow and steady will win this race.