Personally Chosen

We’re mid-way through a move from our place in France to our home in the UK and it’s that final chunk of stuff that’s causing us the headaches.

Most people obviously do a move in one go so the removal firms are geared up to doing just that so they’ll ask how many bedrooms your place has and work out a quote based on that. Snag is that we basically have one proper bedroom of stuff, bits and pieces from the living room, lots of boxes and a fridge which doesn’t map onto a proper move.

That’s, of course, before you consider that it’s only sensible to get a few quotes as there’s a surprising range of prices from removal firms. That range is for a variety of reasons including what they do (they do everything through to just a driver), where they operate, if they use sister companies or if they have arrangements with other companies.

That all comes together to make something like removal firms London a major time saver. You work out your details once, tell them and they pass it on to a whole host of removal firms. Thus you’re not having to convert between lists of furniture and physical volumes and then try to compare quotes on one basis from those based on a totally different premise.

Car insurance companies always seem to have incredibly optimistic views about how well we know what we do with the car, don’t they?

Sometimes seemingly simple questions from them mean that you effectively have to make up the answer. For instance, if you’re looking for student car insurance, are you actually a student? Since you can drive from age 17 what do you call yourself for those two years prior to university? You’re still at school but are you a student? At the other end of the scale what about those of us doing part-time degrees? Is it valid to put ourselves down as students too?

Then there’s the complication of where you park the car overnight. Is it always in the garage or mostly in the driveway?

But the hardest question has to be: how many miles are you going to drive next year? I’m sure that for many people it’s a complete guess.

However, what if they didn’t need to trust just how good a driver you are but could check it for themselves? Finally, technology has come to their aid with what’s effectively a home version of the in-cab monitors that lorries have used for years. This can do things like keep a record of how far you really travel, what the mix of journies is like, where you’re going and how fast you drive. Although this should allow “good” drivers to get lower quotes in time I suspect that it’ll be a while before the insurance companies get a handle on what exactly a “good” driver does so don’t expect massive drops in insurance costs immediately.

Probably the worst aspect of relocating is actually doing the relocation itself ie getting yourself and your stuff from where it is now to where it needs to be.

There’s no really easy way out of this as the house removals company simply can’t do all the work for you and what the various companies offer is basically along a range from complete DIY through to them doing nearly all of it. Where you choose along that continuum is down to your wants and resources although do bear in mind that the complete DIY approach isn’t necessarily cheaper than some of the options that provide you with a lot of assistance.

At the extreme DIY end you can potentially move all the stuff yourself using only your own transport. That’s an option that’s really only viable for moves involving a fairly small amount of stuff and/or over fairly short distances. It is definitely the cheapest option and not too tiring if you can stage it over an appropriate period of time. In practical terms most people can’t do that though and they generally need to hire a van. These two aren’t mutually exclusive as you could move all but the larger items of furniture yourself, using the van just for those larger items.

Moving up you’re into getting people to do some or most of the move for you. That generally doesn’t get you out of packing (unless you want a serious bill, of course) but does ease the move considerable as you’re not lugging boxes out of your current house and into the new one.