A crew arrives, looks at the driveway, looks at the front door, and within about ten minutes knows roughly how the day is going to go. Almost none of what they are reading is dramatic. It is parking, sealed boxes, and whether anyone has decided what happens to the shed.
Moving is priced by the hour for a reason: the work is genuinely variable, and most of the variation is not the furniture. It is the twenty minutes spent finding somewhere legal to put a twenty-six foot truck, or the hour spent taping boxes that were left open because someone ran out of time on Thursday night.
Here is what actually moves the clock, in rough order of how much time it costs.
Parking is the whole first hour
The single biggest thing you control is where the truck can stop. Every extra fifty feet between the tailgate and your front door is repeated on every single trip, and there are usually somewhere between eighty and two hundred trips in a house move.
If you live on a street with permit parking, a narrow one-way, or a shared apartment lot, sort it before the day. Reserve the loading bay with the building. Put cones or a car in the spot the night before and move it when we arrive. If the building requires a certificate of insurance or an elevator booking, ask for it two weeks out, not the morning of — those take days on the building's side, not minutes.
A long carry is one of the few things that can add an hour to a small move without a single heavy item being involved. It is also the easiest thing on this list to fix, and it costs nothing.
Sealed boxes, or it does not count as packed
An open box is not a packed box. It cannot be stacked, which means it cannot be loaded efficiently, which means the truck fills up faster and the load is less stable. Crews will not stack anything on top of an open carton, so a dozen open boxes can genuinely cost you a whole second layer in the truck.
If you are packing yourself, the finish line is: taped shut, labelled with the room it goes to at the new place, and stacked against a wall so the floor is clear. Not "mostly full and near the door."
The other half of this is weight. A book box should be a small box. We would rather carry forty small boxes than fifteen large ones full of books, because the large ones fail at the bottom, and because two people cannot help each other with something that only has handholds for one.
Somebody has to be the decider
There is always a question that nobody has answered. The bookshelf in the garage that might be going to your sister. The old mattress. Whether the washer is coming. Whether the grill gets drained.
These are not big questions, but they arrive at the worst possible moment — while two people are standing there holding nothing, waiting. Walk the house the evening before and make every one of those calls, then mark them. A sheet of paper taped to anything that is not going works better than any verbal briefing, because the crew rotates through rooms and the person you told is not always the person carrying it.
Whoever the decider is should stay reachable and stay off the truck. One person, one phone, answering questions.
What cannot go on the truck
Some of it is law, some of it is the mover's insurance, and some of it is common sense. It surprises people every time, so it is worth reading before you pack:
- Anything flammable or pressurised — propane tanks, petrol cans, paint thinner, aerosols, lighter fluid, pool chemicals.
- Perishable food. The freezer is not a moving container; it needs to be emptied and dried the night before or it will thaw into the truck.
- Plants, in most cases. They tip, they leak, and a hot truck is not kind to them.
- Money, jewellery, passports, prescriptions, laptops and hard drives. Not because they are unsafe, but because they should never be in a box that could end up on the wrong side of the house at the wrong moment.
Put that last group in one bag that rides in your own car and never leaves it. Same for phone chargers, medication, a change of clothes, and the box cutter you will want ten minutes after arriving.
The freezer, the shed and the loft
The three places that are consistently forgotten. Every one of them is somebody's "oh, and", delivered at four in the afternoon when the truck is already tight.
Empty and defrost the freezer at least twelve hours ahead. Clear the shed or garage into the house or a defined pile — outdoor items are usually dirty, sharp or awkward and they need to be loaded in a particular way, so they should not be a surprise. And decide about the loft early, because a loft ladder move is slow, single-file work and it needs to be in the plan rather than bolted on.
Disassembly: tell us, or do it
Beds, table legs, wall-mounted televisions and anything modular usually come apart. A crew can do it — that is normal work — but it is time, and it is time that is invisible in your head when you picture the day. If you would rather that time went into carrying, strip the beds and break down what you can the night before.
Whatever route you take, keep the fixings with the furniture. A sandwich bag taped to the underside of the frame is worth more on the far end than a tidy box of assorted screws.
The moves that run short are not the ones with less stuff. They are the ones where nothing had to be decided, unpacked, resealed or looked for.
Be there at the start and at the end
The two moments that matter are the walkthrough at the beginning and the walkthrough at the end. At the start, ten minutes spent showing the crew every room, saying what goes and what stays and where the awkward things are, pays for itself several times over. At the end, one more lap of the empty house catches the thing behind the door and the thing still on the hook.
The middle of the day is genuinely fine to spend elsewhere. That is what you are paying for.
None of this is about being organised
Plenty of good moves happen in cheerful chaos, and a good crew works around it without comment. But the items above are the ones where a small amount of effort on your side turns into a measurably shorter day, and on an hourly rate that is money you keep.
If you want to know what your particular version of this looks like — stairs, distance, how much of it is packed — that is what the free written estimate is for, and how we price a move explains what the hourly rate does and does not include.