Two into one · 2 → 1
Two households into one address
The lifting on a merge is straightforward. The difficulty is arithmetic: you now own two sofas, two washing machines, two sets of everything in the kitchen and two sheds' worth of garden equipment, and one address that will take roughly half of it.
Nobody should be deciding whose sofa survives on the pavement, with a crew waiting.
How we run a merge
Measure the room, not the relationship
Almost every argument about whose furniture to keep dissolves when somebody produces the dimensions of the room it is going into. Quite often neither sofa is right, which is an easier conclusion than one of you conceding.
So the first thing we ask for is the new floor plan, or failing that three numbers: the sitting room, the main bedroom, and the appliance gap in the kitchen.
The kitchen is bigger than you think
Two households' worth of pans, crockery, glassware, utensils and small appliances fills a surprising number of cartons, and none of it registers as significant while it is being packed. It is the most consistently underestimated part of a merge.
The practical answer is to pack one full set properly and deal with the second before the vehicle arrives. Loading both and sorting it out at the far end doubles the work and halves the space.
Order of collection matters
We take the larger household first and the smaller second, so the smaller load is nearest the doors and comes off first. It sounds like a detail; on a merge it is the difference between an orderly unload and two people digging.
Where the two addresses are far apart, or one is a flat with a lift booking, we may split it across two visits instead. The survey decides that rather than the map.
The things the arithmetic should not touch
Sentimental objects are the exception to all of this. Nobody should be pressured out of something that matters to them during the week two lives are being merged, and "we only have room for one" is a bad reason to lose a thing you cannot replace.
That is what listed storage is for, and we would rather hold something for a while than watch somebody regret a decision made on a difficult afternoon.
Two households into one
Questions about two households into one
- 01
Can you collect from both homes on the same day?
Usually, and it is the normal arrangement. The larger household goes on first. Where the two are far apart or one has a lift booking, two visits often work out better.
- 02
What do we do with the second washing machine?
Move it wherever you want it to go — a family member, a buyer, a charity. Where the answer is disposal, that goes through a licensed route rather than through us.
- 03
We cannot agree on the sofa. What now?
Measure the room and send us the number. In a good proportion of merges the honest answer is that neither will work, which resolves the question without anybody conceding.
- 04
Can some of it go straight into storage?
Yes, and on a merge it is the most useful thing we offer. The undecided pile is collected, listed and held, and you decide once you have lived in the place a while.
- 05
Is this more expensive than a single move?
It depends on the combined volume and the number of collection addresses, both of which the survey settles. What it is not is two full moves priced separately.
- 06
How far ahead should we start?
As soon as you know the address. The measuring and the duplicate decisions are the slow part, and doing them in the week of the move is how merges go wrong.
How many homes, and how many addresses?
Every address involved, and how many households go into how many. That one sentence tells us more than a room count ever does.