Storage While Moving House: Filling the Gap
Need storage while moving house? We collect, store and redeliver when your new place is ready. Get in touch for a quote.
Moving house rarely runs to a single clean handover. Sometimes the sale of your old place completes before the new one is ready, and everything you own needs somewhere to go for a week or a month in between. That gap is where storage while moving house earns its keep. It’s a common situation, and usually a short-term one: a stopgap between one set of keys and the next. Moving house temporary storage is simply a place for your belongings to wait safely until the sale and the purchase line up.
When storage bridges a move
The most common reason is a completion date that doesn’t match. You have to be out of one property by a fixed day, but you can’t get the keys to the next one until later. A chain makes this harder: one delay upstream pushes everyone’s dates around, and you can end up with only a few days’ notice that things have shifted. Rather than scramble at the last minute, you put your belongings into storage and move in properly once the new place is yours.
Renovations are another common reason. If you’re taking the new house back to bare walls before you move in, you don’t want your furniture sitting under dust sheets while the plasterers and joiners work around it. Putting it away until the rooms are finished keeps everything clean and gives the trades room to do the job.
Downsizing brings its own overlap. When you’re moving somewhere smaller, not everything will fit on day one, and you need time to decide what stays, what goes to family, and what you sell or donate. Temporary storage when moving gives you that breathing room, so those choices aren’t made in a rush on the doorstep with the van waiting.
Two ways to store: do it yourself or have it managed
Broadly, there are two routes, and both are sensible depending on what you need. The first is to rent a self-storage space and handle everything yourself. You hire a van, load it, drive to the facility, and unload into a room you hold the key to. You can come and go as you like, which suits people who need regular access to what they’ve stored or who are happy doing the lifting themselves.
The second is managed storage, where the removals firm collects your things, stores them, and brings them back when you’re ready. Nobody drives anything to a facility, and nothing gets unloaded and reloaded twice over. The trade-off is that access is arranged rather than instant, so managed storage fits best when you’re putting things away for the length of the move rather than dipping in every few days.
Our own storage is the managed kind. We collect from your old address, store your belongings at our depot, and redeliver to the new place once you have the keys. Whether it’s a few boxes or the contents of a whole house, we match the space to the job. The store is heated, so furniture, books, electronics and anything that dislikes damp stay in good condition. It’s covered by CCTV and an alarm. Access is managed rather than open all hours: we meet you at the depot at a time that suits, you’re welcome to add your own lock, and you can visit by arrangement.
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How storage while moving house works with us
The storage runs alongside the move itself, so one team handles both ends. When we come to quote your house removal, we look at what’s going into storage and what’s travelling straight to the new house, and we plan the day around both.
On moving day we load everything as we would for any move. If you’ve hired us to pack, that’s included in the price and your boxes are protected in transit. Anything bound for storage comes back to our depot, and anything going straight on is delivered to the new address. Your belongings are covered by our goods insurance both in transit and while they’re in store, which is worth knowing when everything is handled and moved more than once. We routinely handle delicate and valuable pieces, from mirrors and artwork to antiques, so fragile or awkward items are no trouble to store and move.
When the new place is ready, we bring your things back out and deliver them. You give us the date, we book it in. Because we collected and stored everything ourselves, we already know what’s there and how it was loaded, so getting it back to you is straightforward.
What to put into temporary storage, and what to keep with you
A good rule is to store what you won’t need until you’re settled, and keep with you what you’ll reach for in the first fortnight. Furniture, the contents of the spare room, books, out-of-season clothes and anything destined for a room that isn’t ready yet are all sensible things to put away. It helps to label the boxes going into storage clearly, so that when they come back you can send each one straight to the right room.
Keep a box or bag of essentials to one side: a change of clothes, chargers, medication, the kettle, and whatever the children or pets need day to day. Passports, jewellery and important paperwork are better kept on you than sent off with everything else.
One clear exception is perishables. We’ll move the food from your fridge, freezer and cupboards as part of the removal, but we won’t take perishable items into storage. Anything that can spoil is best eaten, given away or thrown out before the day, or carried with you if you’re moving straight in. Everything that keeps is fine to store for as long as you need it.
If your dates have slipped, or you’re facing a gap between houses, storage takes the pressure off the handover. Tell us what’s moving and when, and we’ll arrange collection, storage and redelivery around your move.
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