Your buyer completes on the Friday. Your purchase moves to the following month. It happens often enough that the removals trade has a standard answer to it, and the answer is not to move everything twice. Handling a household once, into sealed containers that go straight into a warehouse and come straight back out, is cheaper and safer than loading a van, unloading it into a unit, then loading it again on redelivery day.
This is how Britannia Cestrian bridges a gap between completion dates for families across Chester, the Wirral and North Wales.
A typical job of this kind
| Move type | House removal with household storage and redelivery |
| Typical trigger | A chain delay, a renovation, or a new home not ready |
| Property | Two to five bedroom house |
| Method | Sealed wooden containers loaded at your door, stored, redelivered |
| Services used | Pre-move survey, packing, removal into storage, redelivery |
| Term | Short or long term, with no fixed end date required at the start |
Loaded at your front door, not at a warehouse
On the day, the crew brings the storage containers to the house. Your belongings are loaded into them on your driveway or at the kerb, and you can stand and watch it happen. Nothing is loaded loose into a van and sorted out later at the depot.
Furniture is blanket-wrapped before it goes in. A full inventory is written as the containers fill, recording both the contents and the condition of everything going into store.
Sealed in front of you
Once a container is full it is sealed on site, with you there. You keep a copy of the inventory. The containers stay sealed until you ask for them back, and they are only opened on your written instruction.
That matters more than it sounds. It means you know exactly what is in store and exactly what condition it went in, which is the part that turns into an argument when goods are stored loose.
No double handling
The sealed containers are moved from the vehicle into the warehouse by forklift, as units. Nothing gets unpacked, carried and repacked in between. Fewer handling steps means fewer chances to damage something, and it is the main reason container storage tends to work out better than moving a house into a self storage unit by hand.
How long, and what it costs to wait
You do not need to know the end date when you start. Storage runs short or long term, so a three-week gap that turns into three months is a change to the invoice rather than a change to the plan.
The depot holds more than 900 wooden containers, monitored inside and out by 24-hour CCTV, behind a secure perimeter fence with an alarm system. The units are fully insured.
Redelivery on the new completion day
When your purchase completes, the containers come back out and the household is delivered and placed at the new house. Booking the redelivery date as early as you can helps, because completion days cluster at the end of the month and Fridays go first.
Deciding between this and self storage
Container storage suits a whole household going into store and coming back out in one go. Self storage suits a smaller amount, or anything you will want to get into repeatedly while it is there. If you are not sure which you need, the survey will tell you.
Accreditations
- Member of the British Association of Removers
- Certified to BS EN 12522, the European standard for household furniture removal
- Which? Trusted Trader, with independently verified reviews
- Established 1972, and part of Britannia Movers International, a network of 49 family-run removal companies
Book a free survey
Tell us the address and roughly when the gap starts and we will arrange a surveyor to visit. Call 01244 521 950, email sales@britanniacestrian.co.uk, or use the quote form. The office is open Monday to Friday, 8.30am to 5pm.
Related pages
Household Storage | Storage in Chester | House Removals | Self Storage
