The schedule
Not a process you watch from outside. Each of these is a decision with a deadline and a scope of work attached, and each page says what the work involves and what happens if the decision arrives late.
Three of the deadlines on this list belong to somebody who is not us. Those are the ones that cannot be recovered.
Nothing downstream can be settled until these two are.
The survey and the inventory
Nothing else can be decided until this one is. The volume sets the vehicle, the vehicle sets the crew, and the crew sets the day. Every figure anybody gives you before this decision is a guess wearing a number.
What this involves →Restricted goods, and the disposal boundary
Fuel, gas, solvents, open paint, anything perishable or alive. Plus the separate question of what is going nowhere — which needs a licensed firm we are not. Both are settled at the survey rather than found at the vehicle.
What this involves →Materials and crew follow from the survey, not from the date.
Full, partial, or materials only
This decision orders the materials and sizes the crew, so it has a real deadline rather than a preference attached to it. Left late, the honest answer stops being full packing and becomes whatever can be done in the time.
What this involves →Everything with a notice period set by somebody else.
Storage, or a gap that closes
Two dates that do not meet need somewhere for the goods to be. Decided early it is a planned hold with the load built for it; decided on the morning it is a lorry standing outside a house nobody can get into.
What this involves →Permits, suspensions, lifts and freeholders
A parking suspension, a goods-lift booking, a freeholder's permission, a gate code. None can be arranged on the morning and each has its own notice period set by somebody who is not us.
What this involves →The contingency, agreed while it is still hypothetical.
The contingency, agreed while it is still hypothetical
Chains fail, lifts break, keys arrive late. The question is not whether to plan for it but whether the plan is agreed in advance or improvised by a crew in a hallway with everybody already upset.
What this involves →Because a stage diagram describes what a removals firm does, and what you actually need to know is what you have to decide and by when. Those are different documents and only one of them is useful before a move.
The things that go wrong are almost never process failures. They are decisions nobody named in time — a suspension not applied for because the date was never confirmed, a loft cleared the weekend before and not mentioned, a storage question left until the morning of a failed completion.
No price, rate card or transit time appears anywhere on this site, because the first decision on the schedule sets the figure and it has not been made yet. Start on the quote form, or read the questions page.
Both addresses, roughly what is going, and how firm the dates are. Those three start the schedule and everything else follows from them.