3 Tips For Helping Your Elderly Loved One Move Into A New Home
There may come a time in your elderly loved one’s life where they need to move into a new home. Whether it’s because they’re wanting to downsize into something a little smaller and more manageable or they are needing to move into an assisted living facility to get the help that they need, making any kind of move can be a challenge for them. Luckily, there are many things you can do to help them.
To help you see how this can be done, here are three tips for helping your elderly loved one move into a new home.
Choose The Right Accommodations
The very first thing that you’ll want to help your elderly loved one with is finding the right accommodations for themselves. Because their needs may have changed now that they are older, you and your loved one will need to ensure that those needs will be met by whatever housing they will now be living in.
Things like having a convenient location for the places they’ll need to go throughout the week, having few if and stairs that they’ll have to maneuver, and coming equipped with safety features like grab bars and handrails will now be more important than ever. And since it can take a while for you to find the exact right place for them, it’s best to start looking well in advance of when they’d like to be moving.
Get As Much Assistance As You Can
Even if your elderly loved one is doing well health-wise and is still physically fit, they’re likely going to need a lot of help with the actual move. And since you likely can’t take care of everything on your own, you’re going to want to secure as much assistance with this as possible.
If you have family in the area or family members of the elderly loved one live close, reach out to them about helping with the packing and moving process. If this isn’t available to you, you might want to do some research about hiring a moving service to help ease some of the burden on both of you.
Be Thoughtful About Downsizing
For many elderly people, part of moving to a new home includes getting rid of some of the stuff they’ve acquired over the years. However, this can be an especially hard part of moving, as leaving behind sentimental items can be extremely difficult for some people.
If you are going to be helping your elderly loved one with how to downsize your home, make sure you’re sensitive to what they want to keep. And if they have something that they want to give to you, it might be worth it to just take it for now, even if it’s not something you think you’ll want to hold onto long-term.
If you have an elderly loved one that’s going to be moving into a new home soon, consider using the tips mentioned above to help them get ready and tackle their move.