Uxbridge · UB10 · Hillingdon
It is a better question than how many bedrooms, and almost nobody asks it. Two identical semis on the same road, one occupied three years and one thirty, are not the same job — and only one of them has a boarded loft, a garage that stopped holding a car, and a bedroom that quietly became storage.
Free survey across UB10, UB8, Ickenham, Cowley and out to Denham. The loft gets opened, every time.
Six bands
Everything on this site is sorted by tenure rather than by service, because tenure is what the volume follows. It also decides something less obvious: how much of the job is carrying and how much of it is deciding.
A year or two. The inventory matters more than the volume.
Five to twenty years. Where the loft and the garage start to count.
A full house, no surprises
Long enough to have furnished the place properly and filled the cupboards, not long enough for the loft to have become archaeology. The most predictable move there is, and the one most firms quote well.
What it involves → IIIWhere the loft starts
Children have arrived or grown, the garage has been converted into storage, and the loft is boarded. The rooms look the same as a five-year household. The volume is not the same at all.
What it involves →Twenty years and up. Accumulation, decisions and a slower pace.
A house, and everything under it
The hardest ordinary move there is. Two or three decades of accumulation, some of it inherited from other people's clear-outs, and a household who last moved when removals worked differently.
What it involves → VA downsize, done in stages
A long tenure ending in a smaller place. Two jobs wearing one date: a removal, which is simple, and a very large number of decisions, which is not. We separate the two deliberately.
What it involves →The gap between one address and the next, whatever the years say.
The accumulation curve
Nobody moves in with a full loft. It arrives in stages, and each stage happens somewhere you cannot see from the rooms. This is why a measured survey and a bedroom count give such different answers on the same house.
Nowhere yet — everything is still in use
Furniture for the rooms you have, and very little else
Volume tracks the property almost exactly. This is the one tenure where a bedroom count is a decent estimate, which is why phone quotes appear to work and then stop working.
The shed, and the top of the wardrobes
Tools, garden equipment, a second set of everything seasonal
The first outbuilding fills. Still modest, but the shed is already holding things that are heavy, dirty and slow to load, and nobody counts it when they describe the house.
The loft gets boarded. That is the turning point.
Children's things, or the equipment of a settled adult life
Boarding a loft roughly doubles the storage capacity of a semi and it is invisible from the rooms. It is the single biggest reason a quote given without a survey turns out to be wrong.
The garage stops holding a car
Replacements that never replaced anything, plus other people's clear-outs
A converted or full garage adds another room's worth. By this point the house contains a second household of objects that nobody has used in years and nobody has decided about.
A bedroom becomes storage
Inheritances, grown children's belongings left behind, paperwork
The tipping point where a move stops being a logistics job and becomes a decision-making job. The volume is high and, more importantly, a large part of it needs a choice made about it.
Everywhere, in layers
Very little new. Almost nothing leaves.
Accumulation slows and disposal stops, so the total keeps climbing. These moves need more time, more crew and more patience than any other ordinary domestic job, and we quote them that way.
Since you last moved
If your last move was in the eighties or nineties, some of this will be new and some of it will be irritating. All of it comes up on surveys here often enough to be worth setting out before anybody is standing in a hallway with a paint tin.
Then · You found a firm in the local paper and somebody came round with a clipboard.
Now · Somebody still comes round with a clipboard, and that part genuinely has not changed. What has changed is that a good many firms will now quote from a form without seeing the house at all — and on a long tenure that produces a figure that gets revised.
Then · Newspaper for the china, and boxes from the supermarket.
Now · Newspaper marks modern ceramics and supermarket boxes collapse when stacked. Proper cartons, tissue and cellular wrap cost something and they are the difference between arriving intact and arriving mostly intact.
Then · Everything went on the van, including the paint tins.
Now · Fuel, gas cylinders, solvents, open paint and garden chemicals are refused, and that is a legal and insurance position rather than fussiness. In a thirty-year garage there is usually more of this than people expect.
Then · The van parked outside. That was the whole of the parking question.
Now · Controlled parking, permit zones and bay suspensions apply across much of the borough, and a suspension has to be applied for in advance. It is rarely difficult and it can never be arranged on the morning.
Then · Cover was whatever the firm said it was.
Now · Goods in transit and in store are covered to a stated level with stated exclusions, and items of unusual value need declaring beforehand. Worth reading rather than assuming, particularly where a long tenure includes inherited pieces.
Then · You moved on the day the solicitor said.
Now · You still do — but chains are longer and completion hours land later. Loading early and planning to wait is now standard practice rather than caution, and a load-and-hold overnight is a normal option rather than an admission of defeat.
Leaving the country
Four routes with their own pages, each carrying the road out, the regions we deliver into, and a document list split between what you obtain and what we obtain. We are a road firm — anything needing sea or air freight goes to a specialist rather than being quoted here.
The Costas, Andalucía, Valencia, Madrid and Catalonia.
Route, customs and questions →The Algarve, Lisbon and Cascais, the Silver Coast and Porto.
Route, customs and questions →Dublin, Cork, Galway and the west, by road and ferry.
Route, customs and questions →Tuscany and Umbria, Milan and the lakes, Piedmont and Rome.
Route, customs and questions →Tenure matters more abroad, not less: every carton has to appear on an inventory a border official can read, and a long-held house produces a very long list. See how the European side works.
Asked most often
Because it predicts the volume, and the volume is what the quote is built from. Two identical semis side by side, one occupied for three years and one for thirty, are not the same job — and only one of them has a boarded loft, a full garage and a bedroom used as storage.
With a survey, and with no decisions made yet. Seeing the loft, the garage and the shed tells us the real size of the job, and it gives you a realistic picture before you start sorting anything.
Yes, and it is one of the things that has changed since a lot of our customers last moved. Fuel, gas cylinders, solvents, open paint tins and garden chemicals are refused — a legal and insurance position rather than a preference.
We will talk usefully on the phone and we will not put a figure on it. On a long tenure a phone estimate is close to meaningless, because the part that decides the price is the part nobody can describe accurately from memory.
Yes, and on a long-tenure move it is usually the sensible middle step. Everything held is listed as it is loaded, so you know exactly what is there when you come to decide.
All of them, plus Cowley, the town centre, the Ruislip edge and out towards the Buckinghamshire boundary. UB10 is the middle of the patch rather than its limit.
More on the questions page — starting out, long tenures and the loft, short tenancies around the campus, and what the quote is actually built from.
Both addresses and the number of years in the one you are leaving. That second answer tells us more about the job than anything else you could send.