There is a profession in home removals - not only is moving a stressful time, it's a time when time itself is precious (things have to happen in a certain window) so paying for someone to move you is probably part of the deal, and saving your back from heavy lifting is priceless. Because the alternative is not very attractive - hire a van to pack, lift and drive yourself to your new home all in that time window.
So break out the 21st century equivalent of yellow pages, look for some sensible reviews and you'll get 2 book ends:
£2000 all in, based on a tick list you've filled in online of your house contents and sent across to a business run from someone's house
Nudging on £4000 from a reputable company 2 miles away and someone who came to the house an took quite a few notes
We considered the pros and cons and the logistics. We have two cars and a motorbike, some furniture, pictures and ornaments, a selection of pot plants, a piano and the three cats. We both have a max of 3.5 tons permission on our driving license (almost a grandfather right due to our ages!) but that limited the amount of space on the van and quite quickly the van could be over weight limit. We would struggle with lifting and moving the piano and large sideboard. We would have to return twice to pick up the second car and the motorbike, which would cost us several hundred pounds, making it suddenly less value for money.
If we hired a removal company, moving 400 miles north isn't cheap - you've got to pay 2 people to sit in the lorry for 10 hours each way, even though the move bit might only be 2 hours at each end. They've also got to stay overnight somewhere (in the bunk above the cab) and that deserves some sort of compensation! It seems a waste and costly, but it is the most attractive option.
Click on the photo below to watch the moving day video, set to a beautfiul song by The Helio Sequence.
We started trawling through some reviews of the various companies, and although they all seem to get roughly the same ratings on Trust Pilot some of the reviews did scare us a little. The cheapest companies, whilst having some good reviews, also had several really bad reviews saying things like 'They didn't turn up on the day', 'They sub the work out to random local man & van', 'We couldn't fit all our furniture on the van so they drove away/left it on the curb side'. Is it really worth it to save a bit of cash? We didn't think so.
We were still unsure of how much furniture we would be taking with us. Whilst we don't need much of the furniture we currently own, we hadn't decided what to do with the excess. Neither of the children were in a position to take much of it, so we could sell it, store it near the kids would be living, or store it at Clacheranmor. It seemed a travesty to sell it off for peanuts when it could save the kids hundred of pounds in the future. Equally, it wasn't worth storing it in a paid shipping container for £100 per month for an indefinite amount of time. Which left taking it with us, but this meant we would have to pay for a slightly bigger van to take it up there, and then hire a smaller van to bring it back in due course. In the end that final option is the one we settled on.
So, we went with one of the more reputable companies and after some flexing and negotiations, we were in at just over £3000, fully insured, packaging material included and a big 7.5 ton truck coming on Monday the 13th November with a view to dropping off at Clacheranmor on the morning of the 14th. They even put the motorbike in the back. We went with Britannia, a well known company, as this was not a simple move, and (we hoped) a reputable company wouldn't ditch us in a heartbeat 24 hours before the move when they realised they'd signed up to a job that lost them money or their one van broke down! There was also the moral perspective - if it feels too cheap then they're probably cutting corners on something - like asking the drivers to drive over the hours they're legally supposed to or paying them poorly for their time in total. We didn't want that stuff on our consciences for the sake of a few £100s. See how it went in our next post...
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