A survey of the house, not a phone call
For a whole house we come and look. The staircase, the street and the chain decide the job, and none of them can be assessed from a room count.
The house
Whole houses, not van loads
A one-bed flat and a four-bed terrace are not the same job at different scales. They are different jobs, and most London removal companies are set up for the first one.
London has a great many removal companies and most of them are, quite reasonably, built around the city's dominant job: a flat, a couple of rooms, a Luton van and two people. It is the volume trade and they are good at it.
A whole house is a different operation. More volume, yes, but that is the least of it. It comes with a staircase that turns, a loft conversion reached by a stair fitted afterwards, a cellar nobody has fully emptied, a street with no driveway and permit-controlled kerb — and, almost always, a chain.
We only do the second job. That is the entire proposition.
The staircase decides more than the volume
The standard London terrace stair rises to a half-landing and turns back on itself, and at that turn the usable width collapses to whatever the diagonal allows. A wardrobe that walked up the straight flight meets the return and stops.
We measure the diagonal through the turn, not the stair width, and we tell you at survey which pieces fail it. Where something genuinely will not pass, the routes are dismantling, a hoist through an upper window, or accepting it stays — and that is a decision to make before it is packed.
More on terraces and the half-landing →
Lofts and cellars
Both get surveyed as their own spaces with their own inventory. On a London house they are where the volume hides and where the difficult items live — paint, tools, garden chemicals, and a surprising amount left by a previous owner.
Nothing holding fuel or gas can travel with household goods. Far better found at survey than on the morning.
Included as standard
What comes with a whole-house move
Not an options list. These are in every whole-house quote we write.
Dismantle and reassemble
Beds, wardrobes and anything built in the room. Fixings bagged and labelled to the specific item, not tipped into one bag of anonymous bolts.
Beds first at the other end
The new house is made sleepable before anything else is unpacked, whatever time the keys arrived.
Loft and cellar surveyed separately
They are consistently under-counted and they hold the awkward items. Anything with fuel or gas in it is identified before the day.
Parking suspensions at both ends
Applied for with the relevant borough — usually two different boroughs with two different systems.
A written plan for the day
The sequence, the trigger for each stage, and what happens if the keys do not come. In writing, so it can be checked rather than remembered.
Tell us where you are in the chain
Where you are moving from and to, how many bedrooms, and whether you have a date yet. Even an uncertain date is worth telling us about.