If you have any wiggle room at all in your house moving budget, a full professional pack and move is well worth the cost
The number one biggest chore when moving house – especially for avid collectors (hoarders) like me – is packing up all your worldly goods and transporting them to the next place, especially when your ostensibly ‘bijou’ apartment is lined with not double, but triple banked bookshelves and wardrobes so full they have to be forcibly closed.
So, when the opportunity arose to trial a pack and move service by Clockwork Removals, I had not a moment’s hesitation in saying yes.
Step one a surveyor came round to get an overview of the job and check out any tricky-looking items and the entry and exit to the premises. The company usually deal with large houses containing grand pianos and the like so he didn’t think my place would cause much difficulty.
This confidence was reassuring, although it seemed hard to believe that a job that usually consumes weeks’ of time and several days’ worth of discussion/complaining could be greeted in such a sanguine manner.
The following week, with the unsettling feeling that I’d done nothing but stick a few labels on things that I wasn’t taking with me, the Clockwork van and three men arrived with a limitless supply of boxes and paper and ushered my boyfriend and I out to breakfast at the café round the corner, telling us to meet them at our new place after lunch.
Had we had any misgivings about the safety of our not terribly valuable possessions, the discovery that the foreman had transported the Queen and her household between London and Balmoral for several summers allayed them. This was clearly a classy operation and our dusty paperbacks and chipped crockery were probably going to arrive in one piece.
This was confirmed when unpacking the endless but clearly labelled boxes that were piled up in the rooms corresponding to their location in our previous apartment.
Each seemingly inconsequential item had been wrapped with care and packed securely in a nest of packing paper. Going into the full details here would reveal too much about the embarrassingly scruffy state of our flat, but when I opened a beautifully wrapped white tissue paper parcel to find a pair of nail scissors and a razor laid inside I was pretty sure that our few special bits of furniture and glass had also arrived in tact.
Clothes were packed in special wardrobe boxes, with a rail, which we actually used as storage until we bought new wardrobes a couple of weeks after moving.
The whole experience was almost unbelievably stress-free. When people offered commiserations over a weekend spent moving it felt a bit fraudulent accepting.
In fact, the biggest ‘stress’ came from a nagging feeling that we should be doing something in the weeks before we moved.
The emotional side of being moved out of a well-loved flat rather than packing up ourselves was also slightly weird. In the usual process, ‘home’ gets dismantled over time, becoming increasingly inconvenient and boring until leaving seems like a relief. The fact that we were still using the apartment fully until the morning we moved took away some of the psychological easing in, which made it slightly harder to settle and feel at home in our new, bigger place.
But these misgivings are minor in comparison with the bliss of not having to pack ourselves.
Having a team of people pack up your flat and move you without having to lift a finger is a taste of the high life and a far better incentive to seek out fame and fortune than any of the frivolous lifestyle luxuries you might fantasise about when playing the Euromillions.
Clockwork even come back and collect any unwanted packaging whenever you’re unpacked. We held on to as many boxes as we had space for so we could use them again in future – but I’m secretly saving so I never have to pack and move myself again. This is one luxury which is worth every penny.
The cost of a pack and move with Clockwork Removals is evaluated in the survey and depends on the size and complexity of the job
Find out more at 020 8762 0777; info.london@clockworkremovals.co.uk; clockworkremovals.co.uk
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