Before anything else · A
Decide what is going
The first decision on the schedule and the one every other decision waits for. Until somebody has measured what is actually leaving the building, every figure and every plan is provisional.
A quotation given before this decision is a guess with a number written on it.
What the survey covers
Why it cannot be done over the telephone
Because a three-bedroom house is not a unit of measurement. Two of them on the same street can differ by half again once a boarded loft, a full garage and a garden store are counted, and none of that is visible from the number of bedrooms.
A survey takes an hour or a video call. A wrong volume takes a second vehicle, a second day, or a crew discovering at four in the afternoon that the load will not fit.
The loft, every time
It is the single commonest reason a removals estimate is wrong. A boarded loft in an ordinary semi holds roughly as much again as the rooms beneath it, it is invisible from all of them, and people genuinely forget it is there until the week before.
So we open it at survey without asking whether it is worth looking. The same applies to the garage, the shed and anything under the stairs.
What is staying is part of the answer
Sofas being left for the buyer, appliances included in the sale, furniture going to a family member, things being sold before the move. Each is a real reduction in the volume and each is frequently decided after the survey without anybody being told.
Tell us when it changes. It is a phone call, and it is the difference between the right vehicle and a vehicle that was right last month.
And if it changes anyway
It usually does, a little. A loft cleared the weekend before, a wardrobe sold, a relative's things added. Small changes are absorbed without difficulty; large ones need a new vehicle, and the only bad version is the one nobody mentions.
Decide what is going
Questions about decide what is going
01 How long does a survey take?
About an hour at the property for an ordinary house, or a video walk-through where the access is plainly straightforward. Either produces a written volume.
02 Can you quote without one?
Provisionally, and it will say provisional on it. A firm figure follows a survey, because the volume is what the figure is built on.
03 Do you really need to see the loft?
Yes. It is the commonest reason an estimate is wrong, it holds far more than people think, and it is invisible from every room below it.
04 What if we are not sure what is staying?
Give us both versions and we will note which the quotation assumes. An undecided question everybody knows about is manageable.
05 What if things change after the survey?
Tell us. Small changes are absorbed; a large one needs a different vehicle, and the only bad version is the change nobody mentions.
06 Is the inventory the same as the survey?
No. The survey measures what is going; the inventory lists it as the vehicle loads. On a storage job the inventory matters more than anything else in the file.
Which decision are you at?
Both addresses, roughly what is going, and how firm the dates are. Those three start the schedule and everything else follows from them.