A settled household · III
Ten to twenty years
From the street this looks identical to a five-year household in the same house. It is not. Somewhere in this band the loft got boarded and the garage stopped holding a car, and between them those two changes add a substantial part of another property.
The rooms are the same. The building now has two more storeys of storage in it.
What this tenure involves
The loft is the whole story
Somewhere between year six and year twelve, almost every household in this area boards the loft. It is a cheap, sensible improvement and it roughly doubles what the house can hold.
It also makes the property impossible to estimate from the outside or from a phone call. We open the hatch at survey, every time, and it is the single most valuable ten minutes of the visit.
The garage stopped holding a car
On the interwar stock around Hillingdon and Ickenham the garages are narrow by modern standards, so most of them became storage years ago. That is another room's worth, and it is full of the heaviest, dirtiest, slowest things in the house.
It is also where the refusal list lives: fuel, gas cylinders, open paint, solvents and garden chemicals. Finding those on the morning is a bad time to find them.
The boxes that belong to somebody else
By this tenure the house usually contains belongings of grown children, and occasionally of a relative who has downsized into a smaller place. Nobody has decided about any of it because nobody has had to.
A move forces the question. Raise it early, give people a real deadline, and be prepared to store rather than dispose — it is not your decision to make on somebody else's behalf in a hurry.
Do it in stages if you can
Non-essential items collected and held a few weeks ahead makes the final week considerably calmer, and it makes the house easier to live in while you are still in it. On this tenure it is worth the extra collection.
Ten to twenty years
Questions about ten to twenty years
01 Why do you insist on seeing the loft?
Because a boarded loft roughly doubles the storage capacity of a semi and cannot be seen from anywhere else. It is the commonest reason a quote given without a survey turns out wrong.
02 What is in the garage that you will not take?
Petrol and diesel cans, gas cylinders, barbecue gas, solvents, open paint, weedkiller and similar. It is a legal and insurance position. Deal with it in advance rather than on the day.
03 Our grown children have things here. What should we do?
Tell them there is a date, and offer them three options: collect, be delivered to, or be stored. What you should not do is dispose of somebody else's belongings in a rush.
04 Can you collect some things early?
Yes, and on this tenure it usually helps. Non-essentials go into store ahead of the move and the last week becomes manageable.
05 Does a converted garage change things?
It changes where the volume is rather than how much there is. Tell us at enquiry, because a converted garage full of stored items is another room we need to survey.
06 How much crew will you send?
Sized from the measured volume and the access, not from the bedroom count. On this tenure those two numbers diverge more than at any other.
How long have you been there?
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.