To think moving ourselves is a crazy idea.

[havingiraffe]

Planned move date is around middle of August. Haven't started any packing or even decluttering yet. We currently live in a large 3 bed with garage and massive loft full of stuff moving to similar sized 4 bed. We don't have much furniture, no wardrobes for example. Most of our furniture we do have is cheap IKEA crap but we do have a couple heavy oak living room furniture items and massive corner sofa. I feel like we do have a lot of stuff though as we both have hobbies that come with lots of kit and we also have a 3 year old....oh and I will be 5 months pregnant at the time of the move. It about a 5 hour drive to our new house (moving from Midlands to Borders Scotland) so looking at a 2 day moving plan.

My husband is baulking at the quotes coming in for a removal company. Cheapest has been £1300 and that's us doing all the packing and breaking down beds etc. His plan is hire a couple of sprinter type vans and move ourselves with the help of a couple mates. We moved ourselves 8 years ago from a 1 bed unfurnished flat to here but I think he has massively underestimated the amount of stuff we have accumulated since then. He also thinks if we can't fit the furniture in we can just dump it as it's not worth the cost of moving it.

I don't disagree that this will be cheaper (although if we have to replace most of our furniture with new it won't save us money but we get new furniture iyswim) but I think it is completely impractical, friends can be unreliable and it's a big ask, having a little one and getting anything done is difficult (and she won't be in childcare at that time) and I'm going to be having kittens about getting everything packed and loaded within the timeframes. My husband doesn't have the best time management skills, I can just see us up all night the day before the move and then on the day frantically trying to stuff things into a van with the buyer waiting for key handover!!

Just need a reality check am I right in thinking this is just not possible!!!

How do I persuade my husband?

Pay the professionals !

Last move , the inlaws paid the removal men for us as a house warming present ( I think it was £700 )

We moved from a 4 bed detached that we’d been in for 11 years , we had so much stuff !

The Dc were at school , the van was filled twice and I was so exhausted I could have slept the night on a stone floor

Don’t do it yourself , it’s not worth it

Do you have a quote for packing service? I’d never even heard of them before Mumsnet! I’ve gathered they’re not a crazy amount extra and worth their weight in gold.

As a PP said, consider moving cost as a part of buying a house. It took my FIL 3 van loads when I moved in with now-DH. DH: “I knew you had a lot of shoes and clothes but I didn’t realise how much...”

I wouldn't do it if you are pregnant. I've moved 4 x and always pack up my house . That but is easy . You just work your way through the room and label your boxes . The movers put it back in that room and you empty it . Both times I had the house sorted by the next day. But .. I wasn't pregnant !! Pay the £1300 !!

My bil tried to save money doing this - clipped the van and lost £750, fil damaged his back and it's still not right, buyers incandescent at the amount of time it took.

Crazy. The people we bought our current house from did this. It was a bloody nightmare. At 6pm our movers were threatening to leave and put our stuff in storage overnight because the vendors still hadn't cleared out. We ended up paying them about 500 quid extra to help the vendors move out so we could get into our own bloody house. I had a 5 month old baby at the time. It was a nightmare for us and no fun for them either.

Don’t move yourself. The people we bought from did it this way and they weren’t able to move everything out for almost three days after completion date.

They totally underestimated how long it takes to self move and they cost us loads of money because of this.

We didn’t sue them for compensation, because they refused to tell us where they had moved to, so we couldn’t serve papers. But your buyers could and then £1300 will seem like a very small amount of money.

I’m 28 and have moved house 7 times as an adult (over 20 times as a child and teenager). Get removal men. Now-DH refused to the first time we moved together as he thought it was pointless. He has learned the error of his ways.

DH tried to scrimp on this for our move before last. Luckily DM poo-pooed him and said if he was too mean she'd pay for it. They were so good he didn't quibble a thing when we came to move again. Pay for the movers no question.

I am never moving myself again. We did it in January - moving from a rented house to our own place - both 3 bedroomed houses. We have a LOT of books and other crap - minimalist isn't us. The two houses are 5 miles apart.

We spent every weekend for at least 2 months taking stuff to the tip (and most of the Christmas holidays).

We packed endless boxes and dismantled as much furniture as we could in advance - put both kids in 1 room and stored stuff in DD's room.

We had to paint the rental house back to neutral when we left, so we had done most of that by the time we left.

Roped in PIL to take the kids away for the day.
Hired the biggest van you're allowed to drive without a special licence.
Got my sister and my mum and stepdad round to help (Mum and stepdad moved nothing, they just cleaned the new house).
Got the keys at mid-day on Friday, started doing trips in our 2 cars for the rest of Friday.
Picked up the van early on Saturday and did at least 4 van trips. Lifting fridges and washing machines is fucking hard work.

At the end, discovered a layer of crap that hadn't been packed and had to run round chucking it into Ikea bags or bin bags.
Went back on the Sunday to clean the old house.
Old house inspection on the Monday where the factor said the skirting boards weren't clean enough and we had to take the crap left by the previous tenant to the tip.

Finally left keys at about 4pm Monday.

Went back to new house to start sorting there.

Collected cat from friend, forgot to lock the car which was parked in our new driveway, some arsehole nicked my purse and went around doing contactless payments and emptied our current account between 3 and 4am on Tuesday night. (Obviously this bit won't apply to you but I am still bitter)

We were exhausted. PIL were exhausted. It was only workable at all because the distance involved was only 5 miles and we didn't have a specific deadline to be out of the rented house. And I wasn't pregnant and could lift heavy stuff! In your case it is madness.

If you can afford the mover people, use them.
Your DH is absolutely bonkers.

This. It will take ten times longer than he thinks to pack the vans. Get them to pack as well if you can afford it. This also takes ten times as long as you think. It is worth every single penny.

You also don't want to be the CF who's still packing at 6pm on moving day, with your new buyers fuming outside in their removals truck. They may even start moving their stuff in, as you move your stuff out. Chaos.

It will be unbelievably stressful if you don't.

We moved house a few days ago from a 4 bed detached with garage and attic full of Christmas/baby/sentimental stuff. Initial plan was to do it ourselves as we have access to a horse lorry. Started decluttering months in advance (and I was brutal), started packing things into boxes as much as possible a few weeks ago and moving it into storage. Got to 2 days before the big move and realised we still had an absolute mountain to climb. Hired a removal firm in and our furniture alone took up an 18 tonne van. Despite trying our very best and starting early there was just NO WAY we could have done this by ourselves with mates help. And we were moving 2 miles round the corner and had our DCs minded for a lot of it. Hire in the professionals. It will be a nightmare otherwise.

Removal people.

We only moved from one side of town to the other and only managed it as friends happened to have the day off and two other vans in addition to the one we hired.

Yeah, there was a point with about 3 days to go where we looked at each other & realised we weren't packing fast enough.

We get on (bar a couple of me ranting sessions) , have no kids, etc.

Pay the movers. It saves so much heart (and back) ache.

Last time, we moved around 150 miles, 2.5 hour drive from a stuffed 3 bed house.

Due to various issues, on the Wednesday we had packed nothing at all. Thursday, essentials went in the car.
Friday, Pickfords came like a horde of locusts and 5 hours later everything was on the lorry. All I did was clean after them.
Saturday we, and toddler ds went to the new house and dh just stood at the front door and told them where to put each box/ piece of furniture

We have twice movee ourselves..NEVER AGAIN...

Last time we got in movers much less fuss

I have moved myself three times and I am never doing it again. I have also been the friend helping my pregnant pal move herself (her husband went away for the weekend leaving her to do the moving - how he thought she would manage to lift a washing machine etc on to a van when 6 months pregnant and on her own is beyond me). Basically you need to tell your husband that if he insists on self-moving, you will be going to stay with friends until it is done (no packing, no shifting, no driving). It might sound like a lot of money, but factor in the cost of van hire, fuel, time, insurance, stress, and your friends' resentment when costing moving yourself and you will find that it starts to look like a bargain. Do you really want to drive for four or more hours, unpack a vanload of stuff then drive four or more hours again? Ad nauseam? Because it will take more than one trip, even with two vans.

One more voice to add to the throng.... the last time we moved, we had 7 friends and 2 adult DS, I wasn't pregnant and I’d spent months packing the books and bits, which were in boxes... and yet... where did it all come from?
We worked like dogs for 48 hours, back and forth in the largest van you can hire, plus 2 other vans. Nightmare.
And then we found we'd forgotten one of the sheds and contents!
Never ever again.
I'm sure half the reason we're still here 20+ years later is because we are still traumatised...

Just spotted how far you are moving. Tell your husband he is CRAZY!!!!!

We've moved 5 times, and have needed a large pantechnicon every time. And they are HUGE. 2 or 3 vans won't be nearly enough. A mover also knows how to pack safely, load safely and unload safely. Your DH and his mates won't. They'll get stuck moving a wardrobe/table/bed down the stairs. They'll break things. The mates also won't turn up, once they realise what an impossible task this actually is.

Get removers. We've just moved a mile from a large 3 bed to a much bigger 4 bed. We have 3 primary school age kids. Our removers did all our packing and it took 4 big men 2 days. We did a deep clean around them and that was exhausting enough. We moved 2 weeks ago and still have 70 odd boxes to unpack. It took the first weekend just to do the kitchen and dining room, next weekend the bedrooms/utility room/bathrooms but that didn't include kids toys and books because they are in the box mountain in the playroom

Pay for the movers and get a quote for packing as well. Packing is quite cheap. The main cost is the van.

Pay for movers. We did it ourselves last time, as everyone was booked up.
Never, ever, ever again!!

I’ve moved using a relative with a van twice and it was hellish. I was always pregnant at the time and juggling toddler/S which added to the misery. Saying that, we never moved very far away.

We have bought a house in a new city and will definitely be using the professionals for that one! If you can afford it, do it. So so much easier especially when pregnant.

Interested to read this thread as we have never hired professional movers and we have completed some absolutely epic moves on ridiculous scales, with kids in tow. It’s never entered my head to hire people to do it. I’m not sure why! It’s definitely on my radar now if we move again.

‘A couple of sprinter vans’ We did a very similar move recently, it cost about £1500 quid and our stuff (after chucking out a skip full of it) filled a massive removal van. In your shoes I’d book myself and my child into a hotel and leave him to it.

Yanbu, dont do it, message me for nameof a very reason able compeny we are using next week if you want