How to Set Up a Home in a Week When You Have Nothing

There's a peculiar moment in every relocation when you stand in an empty home in a new country, your shipping container weeks away, and realise your family needs somewhere to sleep, something to eat off, and a way to function — by tonight. It's daunting the first time. By the fifth, it's almost a routine. Here's the system for going from empty rooms to a working household in about a week.

Day 1: The sleep-and-eat essentials

Forget building a home. On day one you're building a campsite that happens to have walls. The goal is simply that everyone sleeps and eats tonight.

• Beds or mattresses. The single most important purchase. A family that sleeps well copes; a family that doesn't, unravels. If furniture delivery is slow, even temporary mattresses beat the floor.
• The kettle-and-mug kit. Kettle, a few mugs, plates, basic cutlery, a pan. Enough to make a hot drink and a simple meal. This tiny kit does an outsized amount of emotional work.
• Bedding and towels. Often forgotten, immediately missed.

If you packed a "first night box" that travelled with you, day one is already half-solved — which is exactly why it's worth packing one.

Day 2–3: The functional core

With sleep and food handled, build out the things that make a household actually run.

• A washing machine sorted, or the nearest laundromat identified
• Wifi or a mobile data plan that actually works at home
• A small amount of seating — even one sofa or a few chairs changes how a space feels
• Basic cleaning supplies (never shipped, always needed immediately)
• A lamp or two if the lighting is poor — ambient light makes a bare flat feel human

Day 4–5: The "it feels like ours" layer

This is the step exhausted families skip, and the one that matters most for morale. A few small touches turn a functional space into one that feels like home — and that feeling is what lets everyone settle.

• Unpack the sentimental items from your suitcase first — the photos, the child's familiar toy, the small things that say "we live here now"
• Set up the children's room before any other, fully, even if the rest of the home is bare. Their sense of safety radiates outward to the whole family.
• One good meal cooked at home, however simple. The first proper dinner in a new kitchen is a quiet milestone.

Where to buy when you don't know the city

You don't yet know the good shops, the cheap shops, or where anything is. Shortcut it:

• Ask the newcomer community. A single question in a local expat group — "where do people buy beds/furniture/basics fast?" — gets you better answers than hours of searching, and often a warning about where not to go.
• Use the big, obvious stores first. The large home and furniture chains are predictable, deliver fast, and let you furnish a whole home in one trip. Optimise for speed now; find the charming local places once you've slept.
• Buy second-hand from departing expats. In transient communities, someone is always leaving and selling everything cheap. Their loss is your fully-furnished living room at a fraction of the cost — and you're often buying from people who solved the same problem a few years ago.

The principle behind the whole week

Set up in order of human need: sleep, then food, then function, then feeling. Families come unstuck when they try to build the perfect home immediately, exhaust themselves, and end up with a beautiful sofa and no working washing machine. Get the foundation right in the first days and let the rest accumulate naturally. A home doesn't have to be finished to be a home. It just has to hold your family while the real version slowly arrives — usually about the same time your container does.

This is the arrival end of a much longer list. Our 120-point family relocation checklist covers everything from six months before to ninety days after you land.

Setting up your new home is part of Stage 4 — Arrive — of the Global Relocation System, which sequences the entire arrival period so you always know what to do first. See how it fits the whole journey in the complete family relocation guide.