How does storage work during a house move?

Storage during a house move works best as one job rather than two. On move day our crew loads your furniture and boxes, seals them into containers at your door, and takes them to our own yard. When your new address is ready, we bring the same containers back and unload them in the right rooms. One crew, one booking, one invoice, and your goods stay sealed in our custody from the first box to the last.

That is the whole model, and it exists because the gap between two addresses is the most common complication in moving. The chain completes on different days. The new flat needs a week of work before anything can go in. The tenancy ends on a Friday and the next one starts three weeks later. A standard removal ends with a lorry full of furniture and nowhere legal to put it. This page walks through how the combined job actually runs, what it costs while your goods sit at the yard, and what happens when your dates move - because in a chain, they usually do.

How the job runs, end to end

The full journey has four stages, and the same company handles all of them:

Because the collection, the storage weeks and the redelivery are booked as one job, nothing gets handed over halfway. Nobody else touches your goods, and there is no second company to chase if a date changes. The removals with storage in London page covers the booking side of this in more detail.

What actually happens on move day

The morning looks like a normal removal. The crew protects the floors and doorways, then loads to the plan agreed at the survey. The plan matters because most combined jobs are a split, not a total store. The bulk of your furniture goes into the containers, but the essentials travel straight to the new address: beds to sleep in that night, the kitchen box, clothes for the first week, the kettle. You do not need to pre-sort any of it. The crew labels each item against the plan and manages the split themselves.

The containers are loaded at your property, not at a depot. Each one is sealed in front of you once it is full, and the seal numbers are logged. From that moment nothing goes in or out until you are present at redelivery. Your goods never share a container with a stranger’s furniture, and nothing is transferred between containers at any point.

By the end of the day the essentials are in your new home and everything else is sealed, on the vehicle and bound for the yard. That is the entire handover: one crew, one day, and no lock-up unit for you to drive to with a van you hired.

While your goods are at the yard

The containers wait at our own yard, fenced, gated and covered by CCTV around the clock. Because the seal stays on, security is mostly a matter of custody: the container that left your drive is the container that comes back, and nobody has been inside it in between.

Insurance runs through the whole job. While your goods are on the road between your address and the yard, they travel under our goods in transit cover of £50,000, backed by £1,000,000 of public liability cover. Once the container is at the yard, insurance for goods in storage is included in the storage price, with no separate policy and nothing added on at the end.

What the storage weeks cost

Storage is priced per 250 cu ft container, per week:

One container holds roughly a Luton van load, or the contents of a one to two bedroom flat with the furniture included, so most homes between addresses are one or two containers. There is a quirk in the pricing worth knowing before you book: the tier covers the whole stay, not just the extra weeks. Seven weeks on the short rate comes to £140 + VAT in total. Eight weeks moves the entire stay onto the £15 + VAT rate, which comes to £120 + VAT. Crossing the eight week line costs £20 less than stopping a week earlier. If your gap is anywhere near two months, that arithmetic is on your side. Our storage cost guide works through the sums at every stay length.

When your dates slip

Chains slip. Solicitors, surveyors and buyers do not move to your timetable, and the gap between addresses is where most of that friction lands. The combined model is built to absorb it rather than charge for it.

If completion moves by a week, the containers stay at the yard and the bill simply continues at the same weekly rate. There is no rebooking, no re-collection fee and no fresh journey for your goods, because they never left our custody. And if the slip pushes the stay past eight weeks, the whole stay drops to the £15 + VAT weekly rate, backdated to week one. A longer wait can genuinely cost less than the shorter one you planned for.

When you have a date, you give it to us and we schedule the redelivery. The containers come back, the seal is broken in your presence, and the crew unloads into the right rooms, rebuilding anything that was taken apart for transport. The wrapping goes with us.

When storage earns its place in a move

Not every move needs it, and a good survey will tell you when yours does not. The situations where the combined job earns its keep are the ones where the two addresses do not line up:

• A chain gap. Completion and moving dates refuse to match, sometimes by days, occasionally by months.
• Work on the new place. A kitchen ripped out or floors being laid are miserable with a full house of furniture in the rooms.
• A break in a rental run. Between tenancies, often with a stay with family in the middle, and everything you own in the balance.
• A spell abroad. A contract or posting with a defined end date, and a home worth keeping rather than clearing.
• Downsizing in two steps. Sell the family house now, take time finding the smaller place that is actually right.

If your dates line up cleanly instead, storage adds nothing and you should not pay for it. That is the plainer job, and our house removals in London page is the place to start.

Storage with a move, or storage on its own

Everything above describes storage riding alongside a move, which is how most gaps between addresses get solved. The same container model also works without a move attached: if you are renovating in place or clearing a room for a lodger, we bring the empty container to you, load it, seal it and take it to the yard at the same weekly rates. Our container storage in London page covers how a storage-only booking runs.

It is worth being honest about what this model is not. A sealed container is a store-then-return product, not a visit-when-you-like one. If what you actually need is weekly access to swap boxes in and out, self-storage is the better tool and we will say so. Our container storage versus self-storage comparison sets out which situation suits which, including the cases where we point people elsewhere. And if you are working out how many containers your home would take before deciding any of this, the container size guide walks through the sizing.

Ready to plan the move and the storage together?

Tell us the dates you have and the dates you might get, and we will quote the whole journey as one job.

Prefer to talk first? Call 0207 846 0282 or email info@avivremovals.com. Tell us what is moving, what is storing and how long the gap is, and we will tell you honestly how the job should run - then prove it with an accurate written quote.

Written by Adam, owner of Aviv Removals - 15 years in the removals trade.