Short stays · I
A year or two
At this tenure the volume is small and almost nothing about the job is about volume. It is about a check-out inventory, an hour the agent has chosen, and a room that has to look right once your furniture has stopped hiding the walls.
The sofa was covering something. It always was. Better you find it than the inventory clerk.
What a short-tenure move involves
Leave a gap before the inventory
The most useful scheduling decision available to you, and it costs nothing. Put space between the removal and the check-out appointment, so the marks that appear behind the wardrobe are yours to deal with rather than the clerk's to write down.
Book the clean into that gap as well. A clean performed around furniture is not a clean, and an inventory report will say so in plain language.
Photograph every room as it empties
Take a picture of each room the moment it is clear, before cleaning and before anybody else walks through. It takes a few minutes and it is the only contemporaneous record you will ever have of the state you left it in.
Deposit disputes turn on this and on the check-in inventory, and very little else. A dated set of empty-room photographs settles most of them before they start.
Shared houses and single rooms
Around the town centre and out towards the campus a great many moves are one room out of a house that stays occupied. We treat that as its own job: park once, carry once, disturb nobody else, and do not leave a communal hallway full of somebody else's furniture.
Where several rooms are moving on the same day to different places, tell us up front. It is perfectly doable and it needs planning rather than improvisation.
The gap between two tenancies
A tenancy ends on a fixed date and the next one starts when a landlord says. That is not a planning failure, it is how the rental market works, and storage is the ordinary answer to it.
Goods are collected, listed as they are loaded, and delivered when you actually have keys rather than when you hope to.
A year or two
Questions about a year or two
01 Do we need a full removals lorry?
For a one- or two-bedroom rental, almost never. A van with two crew handles most of them and costs less. The survey settles it rather than a guess over the phone.
02 Can you move one room out of a shared house?
Yes, and it is a large part of what we do around the campus. We park once, carry once and leave the communal areas as we found them.
03 Will you clean?
We sweep through and leave the rooms clear. A check-out clean to inventory standard is a specialist job and it should follow us with a gap rather than overlap.
04 Can you store between tenancies?
Yes, and it is one of the commonest bookings we take from UB8. Listed at collection, delivered when your new keys exist.
05 Can you work at a weekend?
Often — tenancy handovers frequently need it. Ask early, because weekend slots go first and some blocks restrict move hours as well.
06 What about the landlord's furniture?
Only moved with the landlord's written say-so. Furnished lets are common here and moving somebody else's furniture on an assumption causes real problems.
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.