None of these take long, and all of them are far easier before the furniture lands. Do them in the first hour and the first night is a great deal less miserable.
The House Illustration From £19.99 Once the first jobs are done, the house itself makes a good first picture. Upload one photo and see it free.
Find the stop tap and the fuse box
Southern Water put the reason better than we can: "It's important to know where your stop tap (sometimes called a stopcock or water mains tap) is, how to use it, and who to contact you when you have a problem." Under the kitchen sink is the usual place, though older houses hide it in a hall cupboard or under the stairs. Find the fuse box on the same walk round. Neither is a thing you want to be hunting for by torchlight at midnight with water coming through a ceiling.
Test every smoke alarm
Press the button on each one and listen. Nottinghamshire Fire and Rescue Service's advice is simply "Test your smoke alarms weekly", so the day you move in is as good a week to start as any. Replace anything that stays quiet, and take a chirp every minute or so as a flat battery, not a fault.
The locks
Plenty of people change the locks on day one, and we would. Be clear that this is a precaution, not official advice: we looked on 3 September 2026 for UK guidance from a police force, a fire service or GOV.UK recommending it and found none, only locksmiths recommending their own trade. You have no way of knowing how many keys are in circulation, which is the real argument for doing it.
Take the meter readings
Photograph the gas and electricity meters, and the water meter if there is one, before anyone switches anything on. The photo carries the date and time, and those readings are what your first bills are worked out from. Then tell the suppliers you have moved in, as the essentials checklist explains.
Clean, then unpack the one box
An empty room takes ten minutes to clean properly and a furnished one takes an afternoon, so do it now. Then open the box you packed for tonight, make the bed, and stop. The rest keeps until morning.
This is the end of the move and the start of living there. The new home essentials checklist covers the first week's shopping, when to have a housewarming opens the next stage, and a first home gift of the house itself is how the first empty wall gets solved.
The stop tap line quoted from Southern Water; the smoke alarm testing line quoted from Nottinghamshire Fire and Rescue Service. Both read 3 September 2026.