Free printable · the week you get the keys
Free New-Home Move-In Checklist
Ten jobs, in the order that matters, plus the accounts with money, coverage, or a legal deadline attached — one page to take into the house with a flashlight, and one to work the phone from. The order is not arbitrary: it runs from what gets hardest fastest, because for about a week the rooms are still empty enough to get a ladder into and the seller still feels some obligation to answer a question, and both of those close quickly.
Take it with you — free, no signup
Direct download. No email, no account — just the files.
What it does
- Puts the ten first-week jobs in the order that actually matters — not alphabetically, but by what closes fastest, starting with finding the main water shutoff and confirming it turns before you unpack a single box.
- Ships pre-filled with a worked example, not a blank grid: the same fictional household the full binder uses, so you can see what a finished page looks like before you start your own (the blank copy is the page after).
- Lists the highest-priority accounts to open or notify — the ones with money, coverage, or a legal deadline attached — with a column for where each account lives, and a standing rule never to write the account number on a page that ends up on a kitchen counter.
- Prints and works with no spreadsheet at all — nothing to sign up for, nothing saved anywhere but your own copy.
Own it, don't rent it
The first week is one page. The first year is not.
This page does the part you can do on paper. The full binder does the part you cannot: it runs the whole year off two dates you type once — your closing date and your move-in day — with every task and account saying which of the two it counts from, so a household that closes a month before it moves gets a schedule that is actually right. Sixty setup tasks that flag themselves Overdue or Due soon. Forty accounts staged across eight lead-time windows, with an amount and a billing frequency that work out what the house costs to run per month. A warranty index that computes every expiration and registration deadline — including the seller-paid home warranty that often started months before your closing. Thirty-five things to find in the house, seventeen of them critical and counted. And a maintenance calendar whose next due date rolls forward every cycle, so it is still right in year four. Ten tabs across Excel, Google Sheets & LibreOffice, plus three PDF guides.
A one-time purchase you keep and own — your own notes about your own house, sitting between a free printable and a rented home app.
A planning aid you keep, not legal, tax, financial, real-estate, insurance, or construction advice, and not an inspection. Deadlines for driver's licenses, vehicle registration, voter registration, and property-tax relief vary by state and county and change — confirm each one with the agency itself. The worked example is fictional. Keep your filled-in copy where you keep other private household papers, and do not write an account number, a policy number, a door or alarm code, or a login on it. Free to use; please don't resell or redistribute.