So you’re moving out of one place and into another and you’re feeling good about the whole thing. Excellent, you should. You’ve found a new place, you’ve sorted out your storage and you like the neighbours. There’s only one little obstacle standing in your way – how do you move all of your stuff to your new home? This is one of those areas of life where you can choose a path ranging from pure “do it yourself” all the way up to “I’m going to pay someone else to handle every last detail of this, I don’t want to get involved.” There’s a trade-off you’ve got to make, obviously. The more DIY your approach to transport is, the more work, planning and lifting you’ve got to do,  not to mention the fact that you’re going to need to spend a lot of your own time and petrol getting the job done.On the other hand, if you’re planning to pay a professional moving company to handle the whole thing for you, you can expect to spend a small fortune for the privilege. Sometimes you just need to take a step back and do a mental survey of where you stand. Depending on your specific circumstances, your “best option” may be very clear. Let’s take an overseas move for example. If you’re planning to relocate to Australia, then you’re almost definitely going to be relying on a big moving company whether you like it or not (unless of course your worldly belongings can all fit into your hand luggage at the airport). There will be a huge transport ship, it will be covered in containers and one of those containers will be full of your stuff. When that container gets unloaded on foreign shores, a truck will come and pick it up and drive it to your new place. This is just how this type of move works. On the other hand, if you’re moving ten minutes down the road from one cosy flat to another, and you have a car, then the solution is pretty simply. Load it up, make the trip and repeat. Of course it’s not always as clear-cut as those two examples make it seem. Sometimes you’re moving from one flat to another, but you’re moving halfway across the country, which makes doing several return trips difficult if not impossible. Or maybe you’re moving just down the road, but you’re moving the full contents of a large country home, complete with antique lawn furniture or a sofa set and you have many items that won’t fit in your car. Weigh up your circumstances carefully. The main factors that you need to consider are:(1)    Distance.  As a rule, the closer your new place is to your old one, the easier it is to do a “DIY move”. The further away it is, the more you depend on professional help. This obviously depends on how much stuff you’re planning to move.(2)    Existing transport. Do you have a car? A van? Do your friends have transport that they’d be willing to lend to you? Or maybe they’d even be willing to come down on moving day and move a load of stuff each, themselves?(3)    Time. How long can you spare until you need to be cleared out? How long will it take you to move stuff across using all the different options? If you have many items to move and you need to move them far then you may take weeks to do it with your own car or van. A large removals truck could get the job done in an afternoon.(4)    Space. What kind of belongings do you have? Are they mostly enormous pieces of furniture that wouldn’t fit in anything less than a large van? Or are they mostly of a more manageable size?  If everything you own could be fitted into several car or van loads, then a big part of the reason for using a truck disappear. If you’re moving across a couple of grand pianos, then you and your four best friends, each driving a separate car, will probably not manage to pull off the transport.)