When moving house there are a great many things that you need to be aware of if you are going to have an easy time. Perhaps easy is not the right word, but you get the gist. Moving house is an extremely complex process, but is often reduced in the mind to simply packing up a load of your belongings in to a van and unloading them at the new place. Obviously, it is a lot more than that, and with each little part comes a myriad of different things that need to work well together in order for the whole to go smoothly. Whilst there are a lot of these things that are obvious and well known, like packing properly, planning the move etcetera, the reality is that there are plenty more little problems that come of not being particularly use to the process. These are the sorts of things that the removals company will deal with day after day, so it is well worth consulting the team that you use when you are looking in to planning your move, to ensure that you have not missed anything.‘Shapes and sizes’ is a decent umbrella under which to have a look at some of the issues that you may come across, and they are the types of problem that will only occur at the last minute, often when it is too late to solve them easily! The nature of removals means that much of the time you are fitting things in to containers and vehicles, which of course come with weight limits, height restrictions and all sorts of other impeding factors. So, does everything fit into everywhere that it needs to go? For a start, if you are using a man and van, will everything go in? You can find the volume of the load by stacking everything against a wall and measuring the sides, but if one item is longer than the van, this will not always be shown up by the volume, which is an average reading... The same issues apply for accessing properties. Do you have parking permissions for the number of spaces that the removals truck will require? Will the truck be able to get round the corners and through the gates that lead to your home, as well as the one that you are moving in to? There are plenty of horror stories about having to carry the whole move by hand for the last 100 meters! Next up is the ‘delay’ issue. Sometimes things take longer than you accounted for in your plans, and this can have knock on effects. It is always best to have precautions and to leave as much margin for error in your planning as possible, so that you are able to work with these constant changes in timing. If these sorts of problem do get in your way, there is the chance that you could be left with larger issues, like keeping an estate agent, or the people moving in to your old place waiting. In more extreme instances, removals companies will often charge quite heavy fees per hour for time that is not spent working, as it lengthens their day. Therefore, getting stuck out in the cold with no keys to get in the new house because your solicitor didn’t release the funds in time will have worse consequences than chilly fingers!