The thought of moving house is right up there alongside the dreaded necessities such as doing your tax return, emptying the dishwasher and taking out the bins on bin day. In fact, the thought of moving house can be even more cringe-worthy than the sum of all these other mundane tasks added together. Because basically, moving house incorporates all of life’s least-awesome jobs (like cleaning, washing, defrosting the freezer, cleaning the fridge, organising, packing, more cleaning) into one mother-ship of frightfully dull tasks.
But there is a way that you can turn moving house into a slightly less stressful experience, and instead focus your energy on the positives, and look forward to life in your new property. To minimise the excessive workload that you’ll have to take on in order to get your house ready to hand over, you can hire professionals to do some of the heavy lifting for you. Quite literally.
It’s easy to fall into the false economy of thinking that you can move everything yourself, but in reality, the cost of hiring a professional removals company will pay dividends in terms of the time, energy and reassurance that you gain in return. So here’s some things to consider when thinking about whether or not to hire a removalist:
Don’t be fooled by distance
Some moves are a no-brainer: if you’re heading a hundred kilometres away, you need a professional removalist. But what if you’re upgrading your property and just moving to another house in the same suburb? Sounds like no biggie, right? You can simply ferry the boxes back and forth in multiple vehicles, and hire a small truck for furniture. Sure, that’s achievable. But remember that it is heavy lifting, and will turn into an exhausting day that you will compare to the time you ran a marathon/did an ironman/rode your bike from Melbourne to Sydney etc. If you’ve ever seen a professional removalist in action, it’s like a stealth mission to get in and out as dynamically as possible. They’re the removals equivalent of the Navy Seals in Zero Dark Thirty. Your furniture is getting out of that house as fast and as delicately as possible. These guys are real-world superheroes, and in the time it takes you to fold your futon, they will have emptied your rumpus room of the sofa, chair, TV and table.
Do you want to keep your friends?
A few extra pairs of hands are a great way to get a DIY home move completed a little faster. But few people have ever moved furniture or boxes more than once. Because once you’ve experienced one DIY move, you swear that you will never go through anything so stressful again, ever. That means that whoever you can rope in to helping you out won’t know any of the tricks of the trade; do you know how to fit a double bed out of a single door, along a corridor, down the stairs and out the front door? Possibly not. And neither does Dorothy, your friend from work who has very generously offered you her time to help you move furniture. By the time you, Dorothy and a few other friends have gotten the bed out, a professional team of removalists will have the rest of the house emptied.
It doesn’t have to be all or nothing
If you’ve already squeezed your budget right to the limits, then remember that you can devise a more flexible option that will maximise your time and budget. Why not discuss quotes with your removalist company and negotiate a rate based on a few different options – if you can minimise the workload for your removalists, you can still get a professional move at a more attainable price, for instance, by getting them to move big ticket items only, such as sofas, beds and tables.
If you haven’t been through a house move yet, then moving things for yourself can feel like a bit of an adventure. But for those of us who have experienced the trauma that is ‘Moving Day’, our advice is to let someone else do the heavy lifting, and day one in your new home will feel a lot more relaxed and positive. Of course, there are always people who enjoy the suffering, so to those guys we say just go for it – but make sure you have a packed esky of cool beers to enjoy at the end of the day!