We start at the door you are closing

Why the old house, of all things

Because almost nothing that goes wrong on a moving day originates at the new address. The new address is a delivery: a door, a hall, a set of rooms with somebody waiting to be told where things go.

The old address is where the difficulty is. It sits in a chain. It has a completion hour nobody can predict. It has a loft that has not been opened since the last move, a garage with things on the refused list, and a contract specifying which fittings belong to the buyer. Attend to all of that and the day usually goes well. Skip it and no amount of care at the far end recovers the morning.

Pinner in particular

This is a place of long tenures. A great many households here have been in the same interwar semi for decades, and a house lived in that long does not contain a house’s worth of belongings — it contains a loft, a garage, a shed, and other people’s clear-outs that came to rest here.

The second local fact is the chain. The same streets hold flats that first-time buyers want and family houses that people trade up into, so the two ends of the market tend to join into a single chain. Chains here are longer than people expect, and a longer chain means a later key release.

What we actually do differently

We survey the loft, the garage and the shed before we look at the rooms. We ask how many households are in the chain, and we write the answer down. We load early and plan to wait. And where a chain looks fragile we will propose collecting and holding overnight, which costs something and removes the worst outcome entirely.

We also hand over a walk-through list rather than keeping it to ourselves. It is on the home page. It saves people money whether or not they ever book us, which seems a reasonable trade for being the firm that gave it to them.

How we quote

We survey, then we write a figure down. A phone call cannot see a boarded loft, a gravel turn in Hatch End or a lift door in a Rayners Lane block, and a figure given without those is a figure that gets revised.

There are no prices on this site and no transit times on the European pages. Both would be guesses dressed as information, and the second figure always arrives later.

What we will say plainly

That you should not decide what to keep during the week you are moving. That an estate clearance should not be hurried, whatever pressure the sale is under. That we do not value contents and will not pretend to. That licensed waste disposal is somebody else’s permission rather than ours. And that a job which begins and ends inside Northwood or Ruislip is often better placed with a firm from there.