An animal arriving in a new home is not settling in; it is working out the rules. Whatever it learns in the first fortnight tends to hold.
Week one: small world, fixed routine
Keep it to one or two rooms. Fixed feeding times, a fixed sleeping spot, one person doing the feeding. No visitors. An animal reads consistency as safety, and a settled animal learns faster.
Week two: widen carefully
More of the house, then short trips outside once the vaccination schedule allows. Resist introducing it to everyone you know - that can wait, and it goes better later.
Heat, from day one
Whatever the season, establish the water points and the cool corner immediately. In summer do not take a newly arrived animal out in the afternoon at all.
Rules set now, not later
Whether the sofa is allowed, whether food is shared from the table, where it sleeps. These are far easier to establish than to change, and every household that struggles later decided them by accident.
The vet visit
Register in the first fortnight while nothing is wrong, and hand over the records so the clinic holds the history from the start.
